![]() “I grew up going to the Natural History Museum in London and reading about Mary Anning’s fossil discoveries on the Jurassic Coast – which definitely influenced my decision to become a palaeontologist,” she added. “It didn’t look like anything else I’d seen,” she told the Guardian. Writing in the journal Current Biology, Brusatte and colleagues report how the fossils, which have been unveiled at the National Museum of Scotland, were discovered by PhD student Amelia Penny, who spotted the creature’s skull during fieldwork on the Isle of Skye in 2017. The results reveal the animal had very large optic lobes, suggesting it had very good eyesight. The team also carried out scans of the pterosaur’s skull, allowing them to build a digital model of the brain. “It’s probably about 70% complete, which is really just outstanding for a pterosaur, because these things are very difficult to fossilise,” he said, noting the walls of many of the bones are not much thicker than a sheet of paper.īrusatte said an analysis of the bones revealed the animal was at most a teenager and was still growing, adding the adult wingspan could have been more than three metres. It is not the first time pterosaurs have been unearthed in the UK – the fossil hunter Mary Anning unearthed what was dubbed her “flying dragon” in 1828.īrusatte said the new discovery, dubbed Dearc sgiathanach meaning both ‘winged reptile’ and ‘reptile from Skye’ in Scottish Gaelic, is notable for the completeness of the fossil. Photograph: Mark Garlick/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF “Birds evolved from dinosaurs around the time when this was living,” said Brusatte, although he added birds may have exerted evolutionary pressures for them to grow larger still.Ħ5 million years ago the impact of an asteroid with the Earth wiped out the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and many other species. The latest discovery calls into question the idea competition with birds may have initially driven the boom in pterosaur size. ![]() ![]() “There were pterosaurs living at the end of the Cretaceous when the asteroid hit that were the size of fighter jets,” said Brusatte, referring to the mass extinction 66m years ago that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and myriad other creatures. “We’ve really dragged back in time the evolution of large pterosaurs,” he said.īrusatte added previous finds suggested pterosaurs did not grow much larger than about 1.6-1.8 metres in wingspan during the Jurassic, only reaching much larger sizes during the Cretaceous period. “When this thing was living about 170m years ago, it was the largest animal that had ever flown, at least that we know of,” said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the research from the University of Edinburgh. With a wingspan of about 2.5 metres or larger – around the size of the largest flying birds today, such as the wandering albatross – the creature sheds new light on the evolution of pterosaurs, given they were not thought to have reached such a size until about 25m years later. ![]()
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