By Christa Lest.
An artist's depiction of a new pterosaur from Scotland flying away from a predator.
Natalia Jagielska.
The largest flying reptile ever discovered is a pterosaur fossil that was unearthed on a Scottish island.
The new species has an aerodynamic head and upper and lower teeth that criss-crossed each other like the hairs on the leaf of a Venus flytrap, which provides evidence that pterosaurs started getting larger at a much earlier point in prehistory than previously thought.
Natalia Jagielska says the Dearc sgiathanach was about the size of a modern albatross.
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The Pterosaurs were small, flying reptiles that evolved 230 million years ago. By the end of the Cretaceous Period, pterosaurs such as the Quetzalcoatlus had grown to the size of modern fighter jets with 12-metre-wide wingspans.
There is a lack of information between the Middle Jurassic and the present day. The fossils of pterosaurs from this time are rare because of poor preservation. She says that scientists had assumed that pterosaurs were small at this time, with their wingspans of no more than 1.8 metres.
A rethink is suggested by D. sgiathanach. AmeliaPenny, now at the University of St Andrews, UK, recognised the shape of a pterosaur skull on a tidal platform on the Isle of Skye off the north-west coast of Scotland, UK, where she and her colleagues were looking for dinosaur footprints. Jagielska says that researchers used saws to cut through the limestone and extract the fossil.
She says that a well-preserved skeleton with bones still articulated as they would have been in real life, was revealed through close visual inspection and X-ray computed microtomography.
The new pterosaur has claw-like appendages.
Gregory F. Funston was killed in the line of duty.
Jagielska and her colleagues determined that the pterosaur was a growing juvenile withfused bones in its head and back. It had a larger estimated total wingspan than any other known pterosaur, because it had longer limb bones and a longer skull. The largest members of the species might have been 3.8 metres from wingtip to wingtip.
The animal's upper and lower teeth criss-crossed each other outside its mouth, which would have been ideal for catching fish. It had a long tail and a short neck. Although the top of the skull had been damaged by exposure to tidal waters, this individual didn't seem to have any kind of head crest.
The team named the species Dearc sgiathanach, which means jark ski-an-ach, in reference to the island of An t-Eilean Sgitheanach in Scottish.
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