Sharjah24 – Reuters: A fossil jawbone peeking out from a limestone seashore on Scotland's Isle of Skye led scientists to discover the skeleton of a pterosaur that showed that these remarkable flying reptiles got big tens of millions of years earlier than previously known.
Researchers said on Tuesday (Feb. 22) this pterosaur, named Dearc sgiathanach, lived roughly 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, soaring over lagoons in a subtropical landscape and catching fish and squid with criss-crossing teeth perfect for snaring slippery prey.
Its scientific name, pronounced "jark ski-an-ach," means "winged reptile" in Gaelic.
With a wingspan of about 8 feet (2.5 meters), Dearc was the Jurassic's largest-known pterosaur and the biggest flying creature that had inhabited Earth to that point in time. Some pterosaurs during the subsequent Cretaceous Period achieved much greater dimensions - as big as fighter jets. But Dearc shows that this scaling up had its origins much earlier.
A forensic analysis of its bones indicated this Dearc individual was not fully grown and could have had a 10-foot (3-meter) wingspan as an adult.
Dearc weighed very little - probably below 22 pounds (10 kg) - thanks to its hollow, lightweight bones and slender structure, said University of Edinburgh paleontology doctoral student Natalia Jagielska, lead author of the research published in the journal Current Biology.
It had an elongated skull and a long, stiff tail. An arsenal of sharp teeth formed a cage when it bit down on prey.
Pterosaurs, which lived alongside the dinosaurs, were the first of three vertebrate groups to achieve powered flight, appearing about 230 million years ago. Birds appeared about 150 million years ago and bats around 50 million years ago.
Pterosaurs are some of the rarest vertebrates in the fossil record owing to their fragile bones, some with walls thinner than a sheet of paper.
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