The new pterosaur has been named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, meaning ‘ash-winged dawn goddess’ | Credit: Smithsoniana
A flying reptile that hovered over dinosaurs at least 200 million years ago has been discovered. It’s a new species of pterosaur that scientists found in Arizona in 2011. However, due to the limited technology available at the time, they were not aware of all the features the Eotephradactylus mcintiraae possessed.
The meaning of that hard-to-pronounce dinosaur name is “ash-winged dawn goddess,” as named by the research team studying the creature at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The scientists also noted that the name is a reference to the volcanic ash that helped preserve its bones in an ancient riverbed.
All the details regarding this fascinating, flying “monster” are published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the BBC reported.
“The bones of Triassic pterosaurs are small, thin, and often hollow, so they get destroyed before they get fossilised,” said Dr. Ben T. Kligman, one of the authors of the study detailing the findings.
The earliest pterosaur ever found
Kligman said that at approximately 209 million years old, this is now believed to be the earliest pterosaur found in North America. The site of this discovery is a fossil bed located in the desert landscape of ancient rock within Petrified Forest National Park, he added.
When the “Ash-Winged Dawn Goddess” flew over the Arizona skies, this place was a riverbed, and layers of sediment gradually trapped and preserved bones, scales, and other evidence of life at the time. The river ran through the central region of what was the supercontinent of Pangaea, which was formed from all of Earth’s landmasses.
“Our ability to recognise pterosaur bones in [these ancient] river deposits suggests there may be other similar deposits from Triassic rocks around the world that may also preserve pterosaur bones,” Kligman said.
Studying the pterosaur’s teeth also provided clues about what the seagull-sized winged reptile would have eaten. “They have an unusually high degree of wear at their tips,” explained Dr Kligman, suggesting that this pterosaur was feeding on something with complex body parts.”
They likely ate primitive fish
The most likely prey, he told BBC News, were primitive fish that would have been covered in an armour of bony scales.
“We see groups that thrived later living alongside older animals that didn’t make it past the Triassic,” he said. “Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals lived together.”
Last month, scientists made another fascinating discovery. They had been wrongly categorising a labrador-sized dinosaur when it was found. It is a newly discovered species.
Its new name is Enigmacursor, meaning ‘puzzling runner,’ and it lived about 150 million years ago, running around the feet of famous giants like the Stegosaurus.
The dog-sized dinosaur
The discovery promises to shed light on the evolutionary history that saw early small dinosaurs become very large and “bizarre” animals, according to Professor Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.
Enigmacursor is tiny by comparison. At 64 cm tall and 180 cm long, it is about the height of a Labrador, but with much bigger feet and a tail that was “probably longer than the rest of the dinosaur,” says Professor Susannah Maidment—a graphic showing a Labrador dog next to an illustration of the Enigmacursor dinosaur. A label indicates that the dinosaur is 0.64 meters tall and 1.8 metres long.
The Enigmacursor was a small dinosaur that lived alongside some of the biggest known.
“It also had a relatively small head, so it was probably not the brightest,” said Prof. Maidment. It was probably a teenager when it died, she added.
“Here you can see the solid, dense hips showing that it was a fast-running dinosaur. But the front arms are much smaller and off the ground – perhaps it used them to shovel plants in its mouth with hands,” said conservator Kieran Miles. “Specimens like this help fill in some of those gaps in our knowledge, showing us how those changes occur gradually over time.”
