Largest Pterosaur From Jurassic Unearthed In Scotland

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

Transcript

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

00:04Scotland and we are very excited about this new fossil discovery. It's the skeleton of a pterosaur,

00:11so one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying around back when the dinosaurs were

00:17living. Pterosaurs are fascinating. They're the largest flying vertebrates and first vertebrates

00:22to ever take to the skies. All pterosaurs are above the warm waters of Scotland and fed on

00:28fishes and squids. That's why it has enormous, well-defined teeth and fangs. It's a new species.

00:33We call it Yarkskianak. That's the Scottish Gaelic name and that pays homage

00:38to where it was found, here in Scotland, on the Isle of Skye.

00:44Scotland back then was a very different environment. It got much warmer and humid. It was

00:48almost tropical. Think Canary Islands or something like that. The waters were shallow, swimming with

00:53enormous dolphin-like pterosauruses and filled with squids and ammonites. The lands were swarming

00:58with meat-eating dinosaurs, similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, but much smaller, and plated stegosauruses

01:04and long-necked sauropods, so a variety of animals, you know, from your dinosaur textbooks.

01:09It's an exquisite skeleton. The bones are preserved in three dimensions.

01:13It's 170 million years old, give or take, and it's big. This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters.

01:22That is generally the size of the largest birds today, so already, way back in the Jurassic period,

01:29these pterosaurs were getting much larger than we used to think. One of the most interesting things

01:35about this skeleton is that when we looked inside the bones, at the growth marks, we actually found

01:39that it wasn't fully grown. This was a sub-adult animal and it still had the capacity to get much

01:44larger before it perished. We discovered the fossil in 2017 on an expedition that we did to

01:50the Isle of Skye. It was a University of Edinburgh expedition funded by National Geographic,

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

02:03She saw the jaw bones basically sticking out of the rock, and we realized, as we started to cut

02:09this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws, that that head led to a skeleton. We had to battle

02:16the tides to collect it. We almost lost the fossil. We had to let it go, to let the tide lap over it,

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

02:29it was still there. And then for the last five years or so, we've been studying it here at the

02:33University of Edinburgh.

02:46you