Our team’s 2011 field season extended from February 10 to March 19, 2011, and was supported by the Laurence M. Gould. It was much more successful than our 2009 season. During 2011, we landed at Humps Island, the Naze peninsula and Santa Marta Cove of James Ross Island, and False Island Point, Cape Lamb, and Sandwich Bluff of Vega Island to investigate Late Cretaceous-aged (~75–66 million-year-old) rock units at these localities. Explorations of the first four sites were brief, to establish whether any would merit more thorough exploration in the future. The survey of Santa Marta Cove yielded fish material, and, most promisingly, a two-day reconnaissance of the Naze resulted in the discovery of non-avian dinosaur fossils from two sites. Our most substantial collecting efforts were concentrated on western Vega Island, where we camped for 15 days. Here, we prospected the Cape Lamb and Sandwich Bluff localities, which had already produced important, if generally fragmentary, fossils of fishes, marine reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds. We recovered new fossils pertaining to all of these vertebrate groups—including significant new marine reptile and bird material—and collected an abundance of additional geological data.
Images from the 2011 AP3 expedition. They may take a bit to load, but we think they’re worth the wait!
