Bulgarian researchers discover five new plant fossils on Antarctica

Bulgarian scientists took part in an expedition to Livingston Island in Antarctica, which made a new discovery of five fossilized floral remains. They are about 90 million years old, which is the beginning of the Cretan era, when subtropical forests and dinosaurs dominated on the present-day icy continent, th discovery was announced by Prof. Hristo Pimpirev, Head of the 27th Bulgarian Antarctic Expedition on 1^st of February.

They migrated from Patagonia to the Antarctic peninsula on a temporary island bridge that existed at the site of Drake's Strait. On this bridge from Antarctica, some of the plant species that appeared for the first time there have reached South America. At the end of the Mesozoic era, Antarctica was a green continent full of life.

The discovery was made during a one-week field palace camp at Cape Hanna on Livingston Island by geologists Dr. Stefan Velev and Dr. Kamen Bonev and their colleagues Dr. Christine Trevisan of the Chilean Antarctic Institute and Professor Shafak Altinkaynak of the Technical University of Istanbul.

The research of Bulgarian geologists and their foreign colleagues help for solving global scientific problems such as the linking of the most southern continent with Patagonia and the migration of plant and animal species at the end of the Mesozoic era when it is the warmest period in the whole of the Earth's Phanerozoic history.