The Guardian: Deep-Sea Mining Could Destroy Rare Dinosaur Fossils Hidden on the Ocean Floor

As nations race to mine the deep seabed for critical minerals, scientists are warning that the activity could destroy some of the rarest dinosaur fossils on Earth — tiny, isolated bones that have lain undisturbed for more than 100 million years.

These fossils, such as the record-deep Plateosaurus bone recovered from 2,256 metres beneath the North Sea and scattered theropod and hadrosaur fragments dredged from the Pacific at depths up to 4,800 metres, reached the seafloor through post-mortem transport by ancient rivers and storms. They are almost always fragmentary, but each specimen is scientifically precious, offering direct evidence of how terrestrial dinosaurs interacted with Mesozoic coastlines and how plate tectonics has reshaped the planet.

Deep-sea mining, particularly in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific, targets polymetallic nodules lying on the abyssal plain. The heavy machinery required to collect these nodules would scrape, crush, and sediment-bury anything in its path. While dinosaur bones are extremely rare in these environments, any that exist would be destroyed before they could ever be studied.

“These fossils are already one-in-a-million finds,” says a leading palaeontologist. “Losing even a handful would be a permanent loss to science.”

With commercial mining licences expected within the next decade, researchers are calling for mandatory palaeontological surveys and protected zones before any equipment touches the seafloor. The same technology that accidentally revealed the world’s deepest dinosaur bone could now erase the next one before it is ever found.

From the abyssal plains, these ancient bones face a new and entirely modern threat.