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