![]() She told STV News: "Amazing things like enamel, the shiny surface on your teeth, is intact, so we can actually find out the last meal it ate. This has been made easier by the excellent condition of the fossilized remains. student Natalia Jagielska will now attempt to discover more about how the species lived, including how it fed and how it flew. The fact that the fossil is so well preserved has enabled researchers to determine that it had large optic lobes, indicating that as a species Dearc sgiathanach had good eyesight. Read more Enormous 80-Year-Old Alligator Shot Dead by Hunter in Florida We have the skull, we have the neck, we have a lot of the wings, we have the body, we have the tail." Penny and Brusatte are two of the authors of a paper published in the journal Current Biology that details the discovery of Dearc sgiathanach.īrusatte told STV News: "We're building up this picture of Jurassic Scotland-a little island in the Atlantic with sub-tropical jungles, mountains, rivers, beaches, lagoons dinosaurs were thriving on the land and pterodactyls were flying overhead, but we want to keep finding more. student Amelia Penny who saw its jaw protruding from the limestone layer on a tidal platform (in an area of Skye called Brothers' Point) while on a field trip led by Brusatte. The fossilized pterosaur was first spotted by Edinburgh University Ph.D. Back when it was soaring over the lagoons of Scotland 170 million years ago, it was the largest flying animal that had ever lived, as far as we know." It was about the size of a modern-day albatross, the largest flying birds. "This pterosaur was big-much, much bigger than we expected a Jurassic-aged pterosaur to be. It is far and away the most complete and best-preserved pterosaur found in Scotland, but has global significance." While Dearc sgiathanach may not measure up to its ancestors in terms of wingspan, the creature's evolutionary importance is tremendous.Ĭhair of paleontology at Edinburgh University, professor Steve Brusatte, told Newsweek: "We have an exquisite fossil skeleton that belongs to a new species of pterosaur. The largest-ever pterosaur and the largest flying animal ever discovered, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, lived around 67 million years ago and had a wingspan of 36 feet, or 11 meters, almost as long as the Hollywood sign. And taller than wrestling legend Andre the Giant.īy the time Earth's Cretaceous period rolled around, approximately 145 million years ago, some of the ancestors of Dearc sgiathanach, which means "winged reptile" in Gaelic, had grown to much greater sizes. New Species of Dinosaur Found in Missouri May Lead to More Fossilsīelieved to be a juvenile, the creature's wingspan is estimated to have been around 8.2 feet or 2.5 meters wide-wider than NBA legends Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neil.New Species of Dog-Sized Dinosaur With 'Really Bizarre Tail' Found in Chile.Huge 180M-Year-Old Sea Dragon Found in 'Truly Unprecedented Discovery'.Treasure Trove of Dinosaur Fossils Could Rewrite Prehistory.
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