A new species of flying dinosaur has been identified on a Scottish island after its bones were found in a collapsed rock about 18 years ago, the British Museum of Natural History said on Tuesday.
“This region of [l’île de] Skye is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, so we were only able to collect samples from rocks that fell naturally onto the beach. Crawl over these rocks to examine them […]“We noticed a few bones sticking out,” said Emeritus Professor Paul Barrett, a researcher at the museum, according to The Independent.
It took a team of researchers 18 years to identify the pieces of shoulders, wings, legs and spine found in the stone during a 2006 trip to Elgol, in the southwest of the Scottish island.
After years of physically dissecting the fossil using various techniques to carefully expose the bones without damaging them, they were able to determine that it was an entirely new species of pterosaur, the flying relative of the dinosaurs.
Ceoptera evansae, named after the Scottish Gaelic word “cheo,” meaning fog, the Latin “ptera” (“wing”), and British paleontologist Susan E. Evans, who worked on the Isle of Skye, was said to have a wingspan of about 1.6 meters to the museum.
The discovery of the reptile, which would have lived on Earth 168 to 166 million years ago, was a “complete surprise,” the professor emeritus said, as most of its close relatives in the Darwinopterus group previously came from China, he said according to The Independent.
“Its appearance in the Middle Jurassic of Britain was a complete surprise […] “This shows that the advanced group of flying reptiles to which it belongs appeared earlier than we thought and quickly achieved an almost global distribution,” he added.
The discovery, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, would open new avenues in the study of pterosaurs.
“This brings us closer to understanding where and when the most advanced pterosaurs evolved,” said lead author Dr. Liz Martin-Silverstone, a paleobiologist from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.