Everyone loves a wing lizard , right ? No , I ’m not talk about the rumbustious Dragon from Game of Thrones in this font – I ’m spill the beans aboutpterosaurs , the “ winged lizards ” that lived in the eld of the dinosaur , from 228 to 66 million years ago . Good news , folk music : the sept is about to get a raw addition . A new gem trove of dodo in present - mean solar day Utah was announced at the recent annual gather of theSociety for Vertebrate Paleontology , which include a fresh pterosaur with a wingspan of only 1.3 metre ( 4.5 foot ) .
These fearsome ancient beasts could havewingspansranging from 5 meters ( 16 understructure ) to a walloping 11 meters ( 36 foot ) . Although the wingspan of this new find would have made it the largest flying reptile when it experience 210 million age ago , it is sure fairly puny when compared to its more gigantic cousin-german appear later in the fossil book .
Its reptilian smiling , however , was more impressive : it had 110 teeth , with four of them being 2.5 centimeters ( 1 inch)-long fangs . Its teeth is a foreign mix , with a combining of the fangs and miniature teeth in each side of the low-pitched jaws . This eccentric teeth formula , although seeming odd , is not too unlike to the other flying reptile that existed in the Triassic period , many of which had a intermixture of strikingly unlike teeth shape and size combination .
The fossil , bury in a Triassic haven , was remarkably well preserved compared to most pterosaur remains . “ The animals here likely pop off during a severe drought , and the sediments indicate their carcasses were buried when the rain turn back to normal and the lake fill , with the lapping waves burying the bones with sand , ” say Brooks Britt , an associate professor of geology at Brigham Young University in Utah and one of the authors of the study , in astatement .
Its declamatory drumhead and relatively short extension span intimate that it did not soar over vast sphere in the way a modern - day wandering albatross would , but would instead take poor flights between treetops and cliffs , more like a hawk or a toucan . agree to Britt , it in all likelihood feed in on insects or land - dwelling animals , including a character of ancient crocodile ascendant holler acrocodylomorph . Its specific quarry may have been a sylphlike , nimble form that resemble a cross between a crocodile and a greyhound – asphenosuchian , many fossil of which were also found at the cliff - side site in Utah .
“ pterosaur were the first vertebrates capable of combat-ready flight , ” Britt say . “ This finding is further grounds that flight opens up a broad raiment of recess for occupation , in this case feeding on worm and small-scale vertebrates that expand along the shores of an oasis in the middle of a giant desert . ”
The new pterosaur has yet to be advert , but it will belong to its own genus and mintage . It will avail fulfill the evolutionary blank infinite between the originally , smaller pterosaurs and thegigantic onesthat evolved later on in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods .
It ’s deserving noting that these flying reptiles , in fact , did n’t evolve into innovative - day birds , nor were they genuine dinosaurs – they belonged to their own evolutionary group , thePterosauria .
