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

00:00I'm Steve Brussati.

00:01I'm a paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

00:05And we are very excited about this new fossil discovery.

00:09It's the skeleton of a pterosaur.

00:12So one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying around back when the dinosaurs

00:17were living.

00:18Pterosaurs are fascinating.

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

00:24All pterosaurs are stored above the warm waters of Scotland and fed on fishes and squids.

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

00:32It's a new species.

00:33We call it Yark Skienok.

00:35That's a Scottish Gaelic name, and that pays homage to where it was found here in Scotland

00:40on the Isle of Skye.

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

00:46It got moot warmer and humid.

00:47It was almost tropical.

00:49Think Canary Islands or something like that.

00:52The waters were shallow, swimming with enormous dolphin-like athiosauruses and filth of squids

00:56and amulites.

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

01:02and plated stegosaurus and long-necked cyropods, so variety of animals you know from your dinosaur

01:08textbooks.

01:09It's an exquisite skeleton.

01:11The bones are preserved in three dimensions.

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

01:17It's big.

01:19This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters.

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

01:25So already, way back in the Jurassic period, these pterosaurs were getting much larger than

01:31we used to think.

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

01:37bones at the growth marks, we actually found that it wasn't fully grown.

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

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

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

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

02:02at low tide.

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

02:08to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws, that that head led to a skeleton.

02:15We had to battle the tides to collect it.

02:17We almost lost the fossil.

02:19We 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.

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

02:34Edinburgh.

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