The 200 million year old jaw has been revealed as new species

Scientists discovered a new species of pterosaur – a flying reptile that climbed over dinosaurs over 200 million years ago.

The jaw of the old reptile was unearthed in Arizona in 2011, but modern scanning techniques have now revealed details that it belongs to a new species to science.

The research team, led by scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History at Washington DC, appointed the creature eotephradactylus Mcintiae, which means “goddess of dawn with ash wings”.

It is a reference to volcanic ashes that helped preserve its bones in an old river bed.

The details of the discovery are published in the Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

About 209 million years old, it would now be the first pterosaur to find in North America.

“The bones of the Pterosaurs of the Triassic are small, thin and often hollow, so they are destroyed before fossilizing,” said Dr. Kligman.

The site of this discovery is a fossil bed in a landscape of the desert of old rocks in the petrified forest national park.

Over 200 million years ago, this place was a river bed and sediments trapped and preserved from bones, ladders and other life proofs at the time.

The river crossed the central region of what was the Supercontinent de Pangea, which was formed from all the earth’s males of the earth.

Pterosaurus jaw is only part of a collection of fossils found on the same site, including bones, teeth, fish scales and even fossilized poop (also known as coprolites).

Dr. Kligman said: “Our ability to recognize the bones of Pterosaurus [these ancient] River deposits suggest that there may be other similar deposits of rocks around the world which can also preserve the bones of pterosaurs. “”

The study of the teeth of the pterosaur also provided clues on what the winged reptile the size of a seagull would have eaten.

“They have an unusually high degree of wear at their ends,” said Dr. Kligman. suggesting that this pterosaura nourished by something with hard body parts. “”

The most likely prey, he told BBC News, were primitive fish that would have been covered in bone scales armor.

Scientists say that the discovery site has retained an “instant” of an ecosystem where groups of animals that are now extinct, including giant amphibians and former parents of armored crocodiles, lived alongside animals that we could recognize today, including frogs and turtles.

This fossil bed, said Dr. Kligman, has preserved evidence of an evolving “transition” 200 million years ago.

“We see groups that prospered later through older animals [didn’t] exceed the trias.

“Fossil beds like these allow us to establish that all these animals really lived together.”