Looks at the fossil plant history of Antarctica and its relationship to the global record of environmental and climate change.

This symposium, held in Argentina in March 2003, commemorates Otto Nordenskjöld’s 1901 expedition, and pays tribute to the Swedish and Argentinian explorers who took on the challenge of early fieldwork in Patagonia and Antarctica. This theme is extended to include recent fieldwork in the natural sciences in the Archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic Peninsula and the sub-Antarctic seas, and celebrates the fruitfulness of continuing Swedish-Argentinian scientific cooperation. The symposium and associated activities took place in the cities of Buenos Aires, La Plata and Ushuaia (Tierra del Fuego), and this book includes a selection of the most significant contributions presented at the meeting.

One of the most intriguing paleobiogeographical phenomena involving the origins and gradual sundering of Gondwana concerns the close similarities and, in most cases, inferred sister-group relationships of a number of terrestrial and freshwater vertebrate taxa, e.g., dinosaurs, flying birds, mammals, etc., recovered from uppermost Cretaceous/ Paleogene deposits of West Antarctica, South America, and NewZealand/Australia. For some twenty five extensive and productive investigations in the field of vertebrate paleontology has been carried out in latest Cretaceous and Paleogene deposits in the James Ross Basin, northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula (AP), West Antarctica, on the exposed sequences on James Ross, Vega, Seymour (=Marambio) and Snow Hill islands respectively. The available geological, geophysical and marine faunistic evidence indicates that the peninsular (AP) part of West Antarctica and the western part of the tip of South America (Magallanic Region, southern Chile) were positioned very close in the latest Cretaceous and early Paleogene favoring the “Overlapping” model of South America-Antarctic Peninsula paleogeographic reconstruction. Late Cretaceous deposits from Vega, James Ross, Seymour and Snow Hill islands have produced a discrete number of dinosaur taxa and a number of advanced birds together with four mosasaur and three plesiosaur taxa, and a few shark and teleostean taxa.