Norway Confirms: This Is the Deepest Dinosaur Fossil Ever Found

Norway has officially confirmed that the 4-centimetre Plateosaurus knucklebone recovered in 1997 from the Snorre oil field in the North Sea is the deepest dinosaur fossil ever documented — at 2,256 metres (7,400 feet) beneath the seabed.

The specimen, extracted during routine drilling by Statoil (now Equinor) from the Late Triᴀssic Lunde Formation (~210–195 million years old), remains Norway’s only confirmed dinosaur fossil. At the time of the animal’s death, the region was a vast river floodplain on the supercontinent Pangaea, not open ocean. The 9-metre, 4-tonne herbivore lived on land; after death, its bone was rapidly buried in river-channel sediments.

Over the following 200 million years, plate tectonics and continuous sedimentation pushed the fossil to its record depth. As the Atlantic opened, the crust subsided dramatically while kilometres of younger marine deposits accumulated above.

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate and palaeontologists at the University of Oslo have repeatedly verified the find in official reports and scientific publications. It holds the undisputed world record for the deepest dinosaur fossil and serves as a textbook example of how terrestrial remains can end up kilometres beneath the modern seafloor through entirely normal geological processes.

From the black depths of the North Sea, this lone Plateosaurus bone continues to stand as the deepest evidence of dinosaur life on record.