Seymour Island - Paleontological Significance

Paleontological Significance

The rocks making up Seymour Island date mainly from the Late Cretaceous to the Eocene. Successively younger rock formations found on the island are the López de Bertodano Formation (Cretaceous to early Paleocene) Sobral Formation and Cross Valley Formation (Paleocene) and La Meseta Formation (Eocene).

In November 1882, when Norwegian Captain, Carl Anton Larsen landed his ship, the Jason, on Seymour Island, he returned with more than maps of the territory, he found fossils of long-extinct species. Interestingly, Larsen's trip aboard the Jason was significantly more successful than his Swedish Antarctic Expedition journey between 1901 and 1904. During that trip, his ship, the Antarctic, was crushed and sunk by icebergs, and he and his crew were forced to weather fourteen months on the neighboring Snow Hill Island, surviving on penguins and seals. Ever since his voyage on the Jason, the island has been the subject of paleontological study.

Seymour Island has been the site of much study of the Eocene period of climatic cooling, a process that culminated in the initiation of Antarctic glaciation. Studies of the fine fraction carbonate from sites in the Southern Ocean suggest that, rather than a monotonic decrease in temperature over the Eocene period, the middle of the epoch was punctuated by a brief duration of warming (Bohaty and Zachos, 2003).

Seymour Island has been a site of study of many fossils from this particular part of the Eocene period, during which there was a more flourishing ecosystem with diverse biota as a result of the warmer climate. A diverse array of fossilized species have been studied on the Island, including extinct penguin species (such as Palaeeudyptes klekowskii and Archaeospheniscus wimani), various species in the bivalvia class and various types of flora and fauna.

A fossil marsupial of the extinct family Polydolopidae was found on Seymour Island in 1982. This was the first evidence of land mammals having lived in Antarctica. Further fossils have subsequently been found, including members of the marsupial orders Didelphimorphia (opossum) and Microbiotheria, as well as ungulates and a member of the enigmatic extinct order Gondwanatheria, possibly Sudamerica ameghinoi.