Largest Pterosaur From Jurassic Unearthed In Scotland

Live Science

Paleontologists on the Isle of Skye in Scotland have unearthed the largest pterosaur known from the Jurassic period.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Steve Brussati, I'm a paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland

00:04 and we are very excited about this new fossil discovery.

00:08 It's the skeleton of a pterosaur, so one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying

00:15 around back when the dinosaurs were living.

00:17 Pterosaurs are fascinating.

00:19 They're the largest flying vertebrates and first vertebrates to ever take to the skies.

00:23 All pterosaurs are above the warm waters of Scotland and fed on fishes and squids.

00:29 That's why it has enormous, well-defined teeth and fangs.

00:32 It's a new species, we call it Yarkskianak, that's a Scottish Gaelic name and that pays

00:37 homage to where it was found, here in Scotland, on the Isle of Skye.

00:42 Scotland back then was a very different environment.

00:46 It got much warmer and humid.

00:47 It was almost tropical, think canary islands or something like that.

00:51 The waters were shallow, swimming with enormous dolphin-like pterosauruses

00:55 and filled with squids and ammonites.

00:57 The lands were swarming with meat-eating dinosaurs, similar to T-Rex, but much smaller,

01:02 and plated stegosauruses and long-necked sauropods.

01:05 So, variety of animals, you know, from your dinosaur textbooks.

01:08 It's an exquisite skeleton.

01:11 The bones are preserved in three dimensions.

01:13 It's 170 million years old, give or take, and it's big.

01:18 This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters.

01:22 That is generally the size of the largest birds today.

01:25 So, already, way back in the Jurassic period,

01:29 these pterosaurs were getting much larger than we used to think.

01:32 One of the most interesting things about this skeleton is that when we looked

01:36 inside the bones at the growth marks, we actually found that it wasn't fully grown.

01:40 This was a sub-adult animal and it still had the capacity to get much larger before it perished.

01:45 We discovered the fossil in 2017 on an expedition that we did to the Isle of Skye.

01:51 It was a University of Edinburgh expedition funded by National Geographic.

01:55 And one of our students, Amelia Penny, she found the fossil out at a site on the coast at low tide.

02:03 She saw the jaw bones basically sticking out of the rock.

02:06 And we realized as we started to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws

02:12 that that head led to a skeleton.

02:14 We had to battle the tides to collect it.

02:17 We almost lost the fossil.

02:19 We had to let it go, to let the tide lap over it.

02:23 And we had to worry for several hours, come back nearly at midnight to collect it.

02:29 And thankfully it was still there.

02:30 And then for the last five years or so, we've been studying it here at the University of Edinburgh.

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