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
00:00 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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