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.
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.
01:05So variety of animals, you know, from your dinosaur textbooks.
01:09It's an exquisite skeleton.
01:11The bones are preserved in three dimensions.
01:13It's 170 million years old, give or take, and it'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.
01:33One of the most interesting things about this skeleton is that when we looked inside the bones
01:37at 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 jawbones basically sticking out of the rock.
02:07And we realized as we started to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws
02:12that 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 Edinburgh.
02:37San Francisco
02:38BC's
02:53New Dimensions