(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of paleontologists has described the oldest specimen of a pterodactyl. He is 152 million years old.
It was discovered in 2014 in a limestone quarry near Peinten, a small town in the mountains of central Bavaria.
It took several years of very fine and careful work to extract the skeleton from a piece of stone. The skeleton of a small pterodactyl is almost perfectly preserved.
Pterosaurs were a group of flying reptiles that lived during the age of the dinosaurs, from the late Triassic period (227 million years ago) to extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago).
These reptiles had a wingspan of 1 to 12 meters and were the dominant species in the skies for over 160 million years.
The first pterosaur to be described was the pterodactyl. It was discovered in the Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria, Germany by the Italian naturalist Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784.
This fossil was originally thought to be an aquatic animal, but later French naturalist Georges Cuvier identified it as a flying reptile.
In a new paper, a team of German paleontologists have described the oldest specimen of this iconic pterosaur.
It was discovered in 2014 in a limestone quarry near Peinten, a small town in the mountains of central Bavaria.
It took several years of very delicate work to extract the skeleton of a pterodactyl from a piece of stone. The skeleton of a small pterodactyl is almost perfectly preserved.
The king of the air was only 15 cm in size
“The rocks in the quarry where the new pterodactyl specimen was found are composed of silicified limestone dating back to about 152 million years ago,” says Felix Augustin of the University of Tübingen, lead author of the study. “Pterodactyls used to be found only in younger breeds in southern Germany.”
The specimen is a complete, perfectly preserved skeleton of a small, mature individual. “Only a very small part of the left lower jaw is missing, as well as fragments of the left and right tibia.
Otherwise, the skeleton is perfectly preserved, and all the bones are in almost the correct anatomical position, ”the researchers write.
The kings of the air were of various sizes, including relatively small ones.
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