Amazing 3D fossil of a previously unknown pterosaur has been discovered on the beach From the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland.
With a wingspan of more than 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), it was the largest pterosaur ever discovered from the Jurassic period and last flapping its wings 170 million years ago. His sharp teeth, which would have caught fish, still retained their shiny enamel.
However, this fossil discovery confirms that pterosaurs, sometimes known as pterodactyls, were indeed quite large earlier in their evolutionary history.
said Natalia Jagelska, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. She was the lead author of a research paper on the fossil published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.
The fossil was discovered during a field trip in 2017, After a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, Amelia Penny, spotted her jaw protruding from a rock in the well-known Skye region. In Gaelic as Rubha nam Brathairean, or Brothers’ Point.
I have been given a pterosaur Gaelic name Dirk Sjiatanakh (pronounced jark ski-an-ash), which translates as “pterodactyl”.
“Derek is the largest pterosaur that we know from the Jurassic period, and that tells us that pterosaurs were much larger than we thought, long before the Cretaceous when they were competing with birds, which is very important.”
Anning, the unknown paleontology pioneer, discovered the 3-meter (9.8 feet) Plesiosaurus in Dorset, southern England, in 1823. The astonishing fossil, the first species found intact with its snake-like neck, astounded the world, unleashing dinos which dominated Victorian England and continues to this day.
Jagielska will continue to study the skeleton to understand how the ancient creature lived and flew.
“To achieve flight, pterosaurs had hollow bones with thin bony walls, which makes their remains incredibly fragile and unfit for[preservation]for millions of years,” she said.
“However, our skeleton, 160 million years after his death, is still in an almost primitive state, articulated and nearly complete…as if it had been alive only weeks ago.”