James Ross Island Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica

James Ross Island is a large island of the southeast side and near the northeastern extremity of the Antarctic Peninsula, from which it is separated by Prince Gustav Channel. Rising to 1630 meters, it is irregularly shaped and extends 64 km in a north–south direction. It was charted in October 1903 by the Swedish Antarctic Expedition under Otto Nordenskiöld, who named it for Sir James Brian Ross, the leader of a British expedition to this area in 1842 that discovered and roughly charted a number of points along the eastern side of the island.

The form James Ross Island is used to avoid confusion with the more widely known Ross Island in McMurdo Sound. It is one of several islands around the peninsula known as Graham Land, which is closer to South America than any other part of that continent. The island was connected to the Antarctic mainland by an ice shelf until 1995, when the ice shelf collapsed, making the Prince Gustav Channel passable for the first time. Mendel Polar Station, the first Czech Antarctic Base, is located on the island. The first dinosaur ever discovered in Antarctica was Antarctopelta oliveroi, a medium-sized ankylosaur found on James Ross Island by Argentinian geologists Eduardo Olivero and Roberto Scasso in 1986. The dinosaur was recovered from the Campanian stage of the Upper Cretaceous Santa Marta Formation, about 2 km south of Santa Marta Cove on the north part of the island. The ankylosaur was not formally named until 2006. In December 2003, U.S. paleontologist Judd Case from Saint Mary College of California and U.S. geologist James Martin from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology discovered the bones of a theropod dinosaur on the island. Nicknamed Naze after the northerly Naze Peninsula on which it was found, the Late Cretaceous remains include an upper jaw and teeth, and most of the lower legs and feet. Little information is available, but the shape of the leg and feet indicate it was a runner, and the size indicates it was probably 1.8 m tall and weighed 135 kg. This is the second Antarctic theropod discovered, after Cryolophosaurus.

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