00:00In 2011, scientists from Chile found a weird-looking fossil in Antarctica that looked like a squashed
00:07football.
00:08Almost 10 years later, the rock just sat on a shelf in Chile's National Museum of Natural
00:13History with no specific label.
00:16It went by The Thing in the museum because it looked like something from a science fiction
00:21movie.
00:22When the scientists finally got their hands on the strange fossil, it turned out it was
00:26actually a giant soft-shell egg from around 66 million years ago.
00:32This one is more than 11 inches long and 7 inches wide.
00:35A regular chicken egg is just 2.5 inches long, and an ostrich egg is almost 6 inches long
00:41for comparison.
00:43So The Thing won the title of the biggest soft-shell egg ever found and the second-largest
00:48egg of any animal we know of.
00:51The only bigger egg that was ever found was that of the extinct Madagascan elephant bird,
00:56which is also 1.5 times as tall as Michael Jordan.
01:00The bird, not the egg.
01:02The Antarctic egg is also special because it's the first fossil ever found in this
01:06part of the world.
01:07So whoever left it there must've been one big creature, probably a giant sea turtle
01:13that lived long ago, like a mousasaur.
01:16This is surprising because most scientists thought these creatures didn't even lay eggs,
01:21so this discovery could change what we know about them.
01:27The egg is also unique because it has a thin eggshell and no pores, which is totally different
01:32from most dinosaur eggs.
01:34It actually looks more like the eggs of lizards and snakes, but it came from a giant creature
01:39related to these animals.
01:41No known dinosaurs or flying reptiles from that time and place were big enough to lay
01:46such a huge egg, so it must've been a mousasaur after all.
01:51But we can't be 100% sure.
01:54Scientists did a lot of work and studied 259 types of living reptiles, like lizards and
02:00snakes, and their eggs.
02:02From this, they figured out that the mommy who laid the egg was probably at least 23
02:07feet long, not counting her tail.
02:10During the late Cretaceous period, this part of Antarctica might've been like a nursery.
02:16Paleontologists have found bones of tiny mousasaurs and plesiosaurs in the same area, along with
02:21bones from the grown-up ones.
02:26Archaeologists in Norway made another cool, but literally, discovery and found dozens
02:30of arrows that had been hidden in ice for 6,000 years.
02:35They were melting out of a large ice patch in the high mountains, covering an area of
02:39about 45 football fields.
02:42In 2014 and 2016, when the summers were extra warm, scientists went to an ice patch called
02:48Langfone to look around.
02:50They also found lots of reindeer bones and antlers there.
02:53Some of the arrows were whole and some in pieces, along with 5 arrowheads around the
02:58melting ice patch.
03:00This is more arrows than have been found at any other frozen site in the world.
03:04Some of the 68 found arrows date back to the Neolithic period, and the newest ones
03:09are from the 14th century of the Common Era.
03:12Ice is like the perfect time machine that can preserve whatever ends up there in an
03:17almost perfect condition.
03:19Langfone became famous as one of the first ice patch sites after a local hiker found
03:25a 3,300-year-old leather shoe right next to its edge.
03:30Scientists are studying places like this to understand how people used these sites
03:35and how the ice patches from Norway to North America changed over time.
03:42Once upon a time, around 32,000 years ago to be exact, a squirrel buried some seeds
03:48near a river in Siberia.
03:51Am I the only one getting the Ice Age vibes?
03:54Anyway, these seeds belonged to a plant with cute white flowers.
03:58Dozens of years later, a group of scientists found these seeds buried deep in the frozen
04:03ground, about as far down as a 12-story building is tall.
04:07The seeds were surrounded by ice and bones of animals, like mammoths, bison, and woolly
04:12rhinoceroses.
04:14The mature seeds had been damaged, maybe by some squirrel, but some of the younger seeds
04:18still had good plant parts inside them.
04:21The scientists carefully took those out and put them in small containers to help them
04:26grow.
04:27And here comes the coolest part.
04:29They were able to grow the plants!
04:31Their flowers were shaped a little differently from the flowers of the same plant that grows
04:35today.
04:36After a year, the Ice Age plant even made new seeds.
04:40Based on this, the scientists suggested that permafrost could be a depository for an ancient
04:46gene pool, and we could find extinct species there and bring them back to life.
04:54Scientists on an icebreaker in Antarctica were looking for whales, but found something
04:58way more unusual.
05:00The camera behind the ship, which is as heavy as a car, detected 16 million icefish nests
05:06on the floor of the Weddell Sea.
05:09The nests were located about every 10 inches in all directions and covered an area of 93
05:15square miles, which is slightly bigger than the whole of Washington, D.C.
05:20The colony even had a distinct border, which was a line in the sand.
05:24The scientists were in the area because they were studying a special spot in the ocean
05:29where the water was a little warmer than the water around it.
05:32In this warmer water, they found tiny animals called zooplankton near the top.
05:38When the young icefish hatch, they swim up to this area to eat the zooplankton before
05:42going back down to the seafloor to grow up and have their own offspring.
05:47Since there was so much food, it made sense to see icefish in this warm water.
05:52But they didn't expect to find such a huge number of icefish nests, much more than anyone
05:57had ever seen before.
06:01New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Fund found some old photonegatives in a hut in Antarctica.
06:07They turned out to be unique images from the Ross Sea Party.
06:11It was a famous failed expedition led by Ernest Shackleton.
06:15He wanted to become the first person to cross Antarctica by land, from the Weddell Sea to
06:20the Ross Sea, passing through the South Pole.
06:24But things went wrong when their ship, the Aurora, was blown out to sea.
06:28They had to use the hut from another explorer, Captain Robert Falcon Scott.
06:33His goal was to be the first person to reach the North Pole, but sadly, he didn't succeed
06:38either.
06:39The negatives were made of cellulose nitrate and were found stuck together in the small
06:44box.
06:45The Trust took the negatives back to New Zealand, where they carefully separated them and discovered
06:5022 hidden images.
06:52Many of the photos were damaged, but the Trust could still recognize some familiar places
06:57around McMurdo Sound, a well-known area in Antarctica.
07:01No one knows for sure who took the pictures.
07:06In December 2021, some scientists noticed a strange mark on the Larsen Ice Shelf, a
07:12giant sheet of ice off the eastern coast of Antarctica.
07:16They thought it might be a river flowing under the ice, so they drilled down over 1,600 feet
07:22to check it out.
07:23They expected to find water, but they didn't expect to see that the water was full of fast-moving
07:29creatures called amphipods.
07:31The scientists also found that the water in the underground river had unusual layers of
07:36currents moving in different directions, which they still don't fully understand.
07:42Another surprising thing happened during their research.
07:44On December 20th of the same year, a volcano erupted far away in Tonga, and the pressure
07:50waves from the eruption were detected all the way down in the ice river in Antarctica.
07:56It shows how everything on our planet is connected, even in the most distant places.
08:06That's it for today, so hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like
08:11and share it with your friends.
08:12Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!
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