Largest Jurassic Pterosaur on Record Unearthed in Scotland
During a fossil-hunting expedition to Scotland’s Isle of Skye in 2017, Ph.D. student Amelia Penny spotted something unusual at low tide. Protruding from the limestone was a piece of fossilized jawbone that she and her colleagues suspected was from a 170-million-year-old giant flying reptile known as a pterosaur. Now, scientists have confirmed that the well-preserved fossil represents the largest pterosaur ever discovered from the Jurassic Period.
To exhume the fossil from the limestone rock, the team used diamond-tipped saws and worked quickly against the incoming tide. The skeleton was successfully salvaged and brought to the University of Edinburgh where, after years of careful analysis, paleontologists determined the reptile was the largest pterosaur ever discovered from the Jurassic era. Their research is published in the journal Current Biology.
Pterosaurs, which are close cousins of dinosaurs, mastered flight some 50 million years before birds. Researchers behind the work say the fossil is not only the largest but the best-preserved skeleton of a pterosaur found in Scotland, and that the newly discovered species has a wingspan of more than eight feet. Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to take to the skies and lived throughout the Mesozoic era, and as far back as the Triassic Period, about 230 million years ago. Later, in the Cretaceous Period, some species like Quetzalcoatlus reached the size of a small airplane ...
"Dearc is the biggest pterosaur we know from the Jurassic period, and that tells us that pterosaurs got larger much earlier than we thought, long before the Cretaceous period, when they were competing with birds—and that's hugely significant," Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh who was involved in the work, said in a statement. Their analysis of the pterosaur's bones also revealed that the animal wasn't yet fully grown, suggesting the species can reach an even larger size in adulthood, Laura Geggel reports for Live Science.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/largest-jurassic-pterosaur-on-record-unearthed-in-scotland-180979631/
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