The remains of the largest pterosaur on record from the Jurassic period were discovered by a graduate student during low tide on Scotland's Isle of Skye.
The specimen was almost lost when the tide came back, but researchers have studied it and determined that it is a previously unknown pterosaur.
They gave the beast the Scottish Gaelic name Dearc sgiathanach, a double meaning of "winged reptile" and "reptile from Skye".
The pterosaur skeleton was fossilised. Gregory F Funston is a person.
The team said that D. sgiathanach had a wingspan of more than 8 feet, making it the largest pterosaur in history.
We know that Dearc is the biggest pterosaur from the Jurassic period, and that tells us that they got larger earlier than we thought.
An artistic representation of D. sgiathanach.
There are photos of ancient pterosaur eggs and fossils uncovered in China.
About 50 million years before birds did, Pterosaurs evolved powered flight, making them the first known vertebrates to do so. It was previously thought that pterosaurs didn't reach huge sizes until the late Jurassic or the Cretaceous period, but new research shows that they did.
For example, the largest pterosaur on record, Quetzalcoatlus, was as large as a small passenger aircraft and lived about 70 million years ago.
Pterosaurs needed lightweight, delicate bones to fly, and their remains rarely fossilized well.
To achieve flight, pterosaurs had hollow bones with thin bone walls, making their remains incredibly fragile and unsuitable to preserve for millions of years, according to Natalia Jagielska, a PhD candidate of paleontology at the University of Edinburgh.
Our skeleton, which has been around for about 160 million years, is almost complete. Its sharp fish-snatching teeth still retain a shiny cover as if he were dead a few weeks ago.
D. sgiathanach would have eaten meat. Natalia Jagielska.
The analysis showed that the pterosaur wasn't fully grown. It is likely that an adult D. sgiathanach would have had an even longer wingspan.
D. sgiathanach likely had excellent vision because of its large optic lobes.
When D. sgiathanach was alive, the area that is now Scotland was humid and had warm waters, where the pterosaur likely fed on fish and squid with its sharp fangs and well-defined teeth.
AmeliaPenny is a research fellow in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrew in Scotland, and she found the fossil at Brothers Point while she was a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.
The specimen will be added to the National Museums Scotland collection.
The National Geographic Society paid for the excavation. The study was published in a journal.
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The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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