200 million year-old flying reptile species found

3 hours ago 1

Victoria Gill

Science correspondent, BBC News

Smithsonian The image is an artist's impression of the ancient winged reptile that scientists have discovered at a site that, 200 million years ago, was a riverbed. The image depicts a creature with a long, pointed jaw and wings folded in at its sides. It has its clawed feet submerged in the water of the river and appears to have caught a small amphibian in its mouth.

Scientists have discovered a new species of pterosaur – a flying reptile that soared above the dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago.

The jawbone of the ancient reptile was unearthed in Arizona back in 2011, but modern scanning techniques have now revealed details showing that it belongs to a species new to science.

The research team, led by scientists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, has named the creature Eotephradactylus mcintireae, meaning "ash-winged dawn goddess".

It is a reference to the volcanic ash that helped preserve its bones in an ancient riverbed.

Suzanne McIntire The image shows a chunk of rock that has a pinkish hue. There is a fossilised bone embedded in the rock. It is the elongated jaw of a creature - the newly discovered species of flying reptile. A row of teeth embedded in the jawbone is clearly visible.

The pterosaur jaw is just one part of a collection of fossils found at the same site, including bones, teeth, fish scales and even fossilised poo (also known as coprolites).

Dr Kligman said: "Our ability to recognise pterosaur bones in [these ancient] river deposits suggests there may be other similar deposits from Triassic rocks around the world that may also preserve pterosaur bones."

Ben Kligman The image shows a large, pinkish rock formation with a group of scientists at work on the rock. The site is in Arizona, where rock formations that are more than 200 million years old have preserved and fossilised the remains of animals.

Studying the pterosaur's teeth also provided clues about what the seagull-sized winged reptile would have eaten.

"They have an unusually high degree of wear at their tips," explained Dr Kligman. suggesting that this pterosaur was feeding on something with hard body parts."

The most likely prey, he told BBC News, were primitive fish that would have been covered in an armour of boney scales.

Scientists say the site of the discovery has preserved a "snapshot" of an ecosystem where groups of animals that are now extinct, including giant amphibians and ancient armoured crocodile relatives, lived alongside animals that we could recognise today, including frogs and turtles.

This fossil bed, Dr Kligman said, has preserved evidence of an evolutionary "transition" 200 million years ago.

"We see groups that thrived later living alongside older animals that [didn't] make it past the Triassic.

"Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals actually lived together."

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