Pterosaur fossil discovered in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park fills gap in record
Tucked away in a remote bonebed in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park laid hundreds of fossils, including a fragile jawbone belonging to one of the oldest-known flying reptiles: the pterosaur.
The discovery represents the oldest flying vertebrate found in North America and fills a gap in the fossil record, proving that pterosaurs coexisted with frogs, turtles and older groups of animals like giant amphibians.
The recently discovered fossils date back to the late Triassic period – about 209 million years ago, scientists said. The discovery of at least 16 vertebrate species includes seven previously unknown species.
The pterosaur's wingspan was about three feet and its skull was about four inches long. It had curved fangs at the front of its mouth for grabbing fish as it flew over rivers, and blade-like teeth in the back of the jaw for slicing prey, according to Reuters. The researchers said Eotephradactylus would have had a tail, as all early pterosaurs did.
Paleontologist Ben Kligman of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History led the study describing the discovery which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Kligman told Paste BN the initial motivation of this field work was to find layers of rock that might preserve early mammal fossils.
"As so often happens in the field of paleontology: you go looking for one thing and you find something totally different." said Kligman.
"The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities where we start seeing groups that thrive later in the Mesozoic living alongside these older animals that don’t make it past the Triassic," according to Kligman.
These fossils, which date back to the late Triassic period, provide a snapshot in time of a once dynamic ecosystem of different species living together. The fossil site is also key for understanding the evolutionary origins of both turtles and pterosaurs, Kligman added. Pterosaurs flourished during all periods (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous) of the Mesozoic Era.
Where was the pterosaur discovered?
The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona is known for producing fossils of plants and animals from the Triassic time period, Reuters reported. Remains of the pterosaur along with primitive frogs, lizard-like reptiles and one of the oldest-known turtles were all discovered in the national park.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, followed much later by birds and bats, Reuters reported. The oldest-known fossils of these seagull-sized reptiles were found in Europe and date back to around 215 million years, researchers said. But pterosaurs are thought to have appeared even further back – roughly 230 million years ago, around the same time as the earliest dinosaurs.
The name means 'ash-winged dawn goddess,' and refers to the fossil site’s volcanic ash and the animals’ position near the base of the pterosaur evolutionary tree, according to a statement from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
The newly identified pterosaur – Eotephradactylus mcintire – is named after Suzanne McIntire, who discovered the fossil after it was brought to Smithsonian's FossiLab along with 1,200 other individual fossils.
"What was exciting about uncovering this specimen was that the teeth were still in the bone, so I knew the animal would be much easier to identify," McIntire said in a statement.
The Triassic era came on the heels of Earth's biggest mass extinction 252 million years ago, and ended 51 million years later with another mass extinction that wiped out many of the major competitors to the dinosaurs, according to Reuters. While frogs and turtles are still around today, pterosaurs dominated the skies until an asteroid impact ended the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
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Contributing: Will Dunham, Reuters