Large parts of Antarctica were once covered in temperate forest, and fossilised wood, leaves and roots preserved in its rocks reveal a green polar world where dinosaurs roamed beneath months of winter darkness.

Large parts of Antarctica were once covered in temperate forest, and fossilised wood, leaves and roots preserved in its rocks reveal a green polar world where dinosaurs roamed beneath months of winter darkness.

The easiest mistake to make about Antarctica is to treat the ice as if it has always been there. The modern continent feels so absolute that it is hard to imagine it any other way: white, wind-scoured, almost empty, and locked under kilometres of ice. But the rocks keep a different memory. Those rocks show that large parts of Antarctica were once green. Not merely mossy or seasonally thawed, but forested. In the Cretaceous, when Earth was much w…