Scientists in the Australian state of Queensland announced their discovery of a pterosaur that lived alongside various dinosaurs and marine reptiles during the Cretaceous period.
The fossils of the pterosaur, called Halyskia petersni, are the most complete of any pterosaur found in Australia.
It had a wingspan of 4.6 metres, and lived about 100 million years ago, making “Halyscia” slightly larger and about five million years older than a closely related Australian pterosaur whose fossils were found in 2019.
“Haliskia” means “sea ghost,” and this creature may have had a frightening appearance as it soared above the waves.
“Eromanga was a vast inland sea covering large parts of Australia when this pterosaur lived, but both have disappeared,” said Adele Pentland, a doctoral student in paleontology at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of the study, published this week in Scientific Reports. It is clear from the excavations found in the area.”
The fragility of the pterosaur skeleton does not provide a suitable opportunity for fossilization. 22 percent of the skeleton of Haleskia was extracted from the ground, with the entire lower jaw, the tip of the upper jaw, throat bones, 43 teeth, vertebrae from the spine, ribs, bones from both wings, and part of one leg.
“We inferred the presence of a muscular tongue based on the relative length of the throat bones compared to the length of the lower jaw,” Pentland said.
“In many other pterosaurs, the length of the throat bones is 30 or 60 percent of the length of the lower jaw, while in Haleskia the length of the throat bones is 70 percent of the length of the lower jaw. This means that when hunting fish and squid-like cephalopods, Haleskia may have had superiority,” she added. It enables it to seize live prey in its jaws.”
Pentland said she was “amazed” that the Haliskia specimen preserved the throat bones because these bones were “as thin as a piece of spaghetti and one of them is completely complete.”
The fossils of “Halyskia” are more complete than those of the tyrannosaurus “Ferrodraco.” Both are from a group of pterosaurs called anhangirians, which have been identified from fossils found in China, the United States, Brazil, England, Spain and Morocco.
Pterosaurs were the first of three vertebrate groups to be able to fly and appeared about 230 million years ago. Birds appeared about 150 million years ago, and bats about 50 million years ago. The pterosaurs disappeared in the same mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
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