Largest Pterosaur From Jurassic Unearthed In Scotland

Paleontologists on the Isle of Skye in Scotland have unearthed the largest pterosaur known from the Jurassic period.

Transcript

00:00I'm Steve Brussati. I'm a paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,

00:04and we are very excited about this new fossil discovery. It's the skeleton of a pterosaur.

00:11So one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying around back when the dinosaurs were

00:17living. Pterosaurs are fascinating. They're the largest flying vertebrates and first vertebrates

00:22to ever take to the skies. All pterosaurs are stored above the warm waters of Scotland and

00:27fed on fishes and squids. That's why it has enormous, well-defined teeth and fangs.

00:32It's a new species. We call it Yark-Scianach. That's a Scottish Gaelic name, and that pays

00:37homage to where it was found here in Scotland on the Isle of Skye.

00:44Scotland back then was a very different environment. It got moot warmer and humid. It was almost tropical.

00:48Think Canary Islands or something like that. The waters were shallow, swimming with enormous

00:53dolphin-like pterosauruses and pilfered squids and ammonites. The lands were swarming with meat-eating

00:59dinosaurs, similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, but much smaller, and plated stegosauruses and log-necked

01:04cyropods. So variety of animals you know from your dinosaur textbooks.

01:09It's an exquisite skeleton. The bones are preserved in three dimensions. It's 170 million years old,

01:16give or take, and it's big. This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters. That is generally the

01:23size of the largest birds today. So already, way back in the Jurassic period, these pterosaurs were

01:30getting much larger than we used to think. One of the most interesting things about this skeleton is

01:36that when we looked inside the bones at the growth marks, we actually found that it wasn't fully grown.

01:40This was a sub-adult animal, and it still had the capacity to get much larger before it perished.

01:46We discovered the fossil in 2017 on an expedition that we did to the Isle of Skye. It was a University

01:52of Edinburgh expedition funded by National Geographic. And one of our students, Amelia Penney,

01:57she found the fossil out at a site on the coast at low tide. She saw the jaw bones basically sticking

02:05out of the rock. And we realized, as we started to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip

02:11saws, that that head led to a skeleton. We had to battle the tides to collect it. We almost lost

02:18the fossil. We had to let it go, to let the tide lap over it. And we had to worry for several hours,

02:26come back nearly at midnight to collect it, and thankfully it was still there. And then for the last

02:31five years or so, we've been studying it here at the University of Edinburgh.