New discovery lends important insight into the evolution of these giant flying reptiles.
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsPterosaurs first appeared 215 million years ago. They took to the air 50 million years before birds. And while they lived alongside some of the bigwigs of the Cretaceous period like Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus, these weren’t dinosaurs — they were flying reptiles that successfully ruled the skies until they went extinct 66 million years ago.
“Pterosaurs are some of the rarest vertebrate animals in the fossil record. Their bones are so lightweight and fragile, some with walls thinner than a sheet of paper,” says Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist and professor at The University of Edinburgh. “They had to be light to fly, but their wispy bones are so easily destroyed that they rarely turned to fossils.”The fossil was first discovered in 2017 on a National Geographic-funded expedition by one of Brussatte’s PhD students, Amelia Penny.
The sheer size of the specimen surprised Jagielska. She says that pterosaurs would get much bigger by the end Cretaceous period — in some cases, as big as buses. But their larger size during the Jurassic was unexpected. It shows a transitional period of evolution and fills in an important and frustrating gap in our understanding of pterosaurs. Fossils during the Middle Jurassic are usually poorly preserved due to a rise in environmental humidity.
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