[imagesource: Illustration by Natalia Jagielska]

A newly discovered fossil specimen found on the wave-battered coastline of Scotland’s Isle of Skye is the largest winged reptile from the Jurassic Period ever found.

The wingspan is more than 2,5 metres – in line with today’s biggest albatrosses – and by the looks of its bone structure, the creature wasn’t done growing when it died.

The fossil of the Dearc sgiathanach (a Gaelic name pronounced as “jark ski-an-ach”), a kind of pterosaurs or pterodactyl, is providing new insights thanks to its pristine condition.

The condition is remarkable considering how the fossil is 170 million years old and even still has shiny enamel on its teeth.

Image: Stewart Attwood

Natalia Jagielska from the University of Edinburgh said Dearc is a “fantastic example of why palaeontology will never cease to be astounding,” via CNET:

“Pterosaurs preserved in such quality are exceedingly rare and are usually reserved to select rock formations in Brazil and China. And yet, an enormous superbly preserved pterosaur emerged from a tidal platform in Scotland.”

She is the lead author of a paper on the pterosaur published in the journal Current Biology.

Its claw:

Image: Gregory F Funston

Here’s Jagielska again, via New Scientist:

“This is the first time in the very long history [of UK pterosaur research] that we have found a skull and the body attached, and especially representing a species and a time period that’s so poorly understood,” says Jagielska.

“So it’s super, super exciting to be making history in terms of research.”

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the paper, said that the find has proven hugely significant in pointing to how the “pterosaurs got larger much earlier than we thought, long before the Cretaceous period when they were competing with birds”.

Image: Natalia Jagielska

During the Cretaceous Period – a time populated by terrestrial dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops – the flying reptiles, once believed to be small, had actually grown to the size of modern fighter jets with 12-metre-wide wingspans:

“In between, there is just this lack of information,” says Jagielska, referring specifically to the Middle Jurassic, around 174 million to 164 million years ago. Few pterosaur fossils from this time are left worldwide – probably because climatic conditions weren’t favourable for their preservation.

Scientists had generally assumed that pterosaurs remained small at this time, with wingspans of no more than 1.8 metres, before becoming larger at the very end of the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, she says.

The fortuitous fossil find was unearthed by PhD student Amelia Penny during an excavation funded by the National Geographic Society.

Brusatte mentioned that this discovery is the best one found in Britain since the early 1800s.

[sources:newscientist&physorg&cnet]