The remains of a rare small-bodied pterosaur (a flying reptile from the Late Cretaceous period approximately 77 million years ago) have been discovered on the west coast of North America.
While most pterosaurs from the Late Cretaceous period were quite large with wingspans of between four and eleven metres, in contrast this new specimen (the first of its kind to be associated with this time) had a wingspan of only 1.5 metres.
The remains are the first to be positively identified from British Columbia, Canada, and have been identified as belonging to an azhdarchoid pterosaur, a group of short-winged and toothless flying reptiles which dominated the final phase of pterosaur evolution.
Previous studies suggest that the Late Cretaceous skies were only occupied by much larger pterosaur species and birds, but this new finding, which is reported in the Royal Society journal Open Science, provides crucial information about the diversity and success of Late Cretaceous pterosaurs.
Lead author of the study Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone, a Palaeobiology PhD student at the University of Southampton, said:
“This new pterosaur is exciting because it suggests that small pterosaurs were present all the way until the end of the Cretaceous, and weren’t outcompeted by birds. The hollow bones of pterosaurs are notoriously poorly preserved, and larger animals seem to be preferentially preserved in similarly aged Late Cretaceous ecosystems of North America. This suggests that a small pterosaur would very rarely be preserved, but not necessarily that they didn’t exist.”
The study, which also involved researchers from the University of Portsmouth, North Carolina State University, and the University of Alberta, was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The full story can be read here.
