During the latest meeting of the Vertebrate Paleontology Society, held recently in Dallas, paleontologist Brooks Britt, from the Department of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University, announced the discovery of a new species of pterosaur, which lived in western North America during the Triassic.
The remains were located in 2014, while a rocky structure from an ancient cliff was being studied at the aforementioned institution, in what is now the border between Utah and Colorado, where numerous fossils from that time have been found. Now, Britt, who has coordinated the analysis of the specimen, points out that this predator probably lived near a lake surrounded by large dunes , an oasis where many animals congregated. Back then, a few million years after the first dinosaurs emerged, the area was a vast desert.
Unlike most of the pterosaur remains discovered so far, these are in fairly good condition. From the wing bones it has been possible to establish, for example, that the specimen measured 1.3 meters in wingspan. The skull has also revealed that it had small and robust eyes and prominent jaws , equipped with 110 teeth, 30 in the upper one and 80 in the lower one. Although most are not very large, among the latter stand out four sharp fangs almost 3 centimeters long.
Experts believe that it could have fed on small sphenosuchians, reptiles that sported a kind of dermal armor on their backs whose appearance vaguely resembles that of crocodiles. “The pterosaur probably died during a dry season,” Britt notes. ” The study of the sediments indicates that when the rains returned and the lake was filled, the waves caused the sand to bury the body, ” he clarifies.
The find sheds some light on the evolution of flying reptiles , as it fills a gap in the fossil record, between the first small pterosaurs and the larger ones that appeared later than this species.
Image: Josh Cotton / Brigham Young University
