The well-preserved find from Scotland’s Isle of Skye offers a rare peek into the evolutionary journey of these ancient wonders on wings
“This is probably the nicest skeleton that’s been found in Britain since the time of Mary Anning,” says National Geographic Explorer Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the study’s senior author.: an extraordinarily diverse group of winged reptiles that ranged from fuzzy creatures with wide eyes and frog-like mouths to giraffe-size titans with a fighter jet’s wingspan.
Over lunch, Penny showed Brusatte a picture of what she had seen, which Brusatte recognized as the partial jaw of a pterosaur. Even from the bits peeking out of the rock, the team could tell that this pterosaur was big—and, by the looks of it, extremely well preserved. The next day Brusatte summoned a local museum owner and contractor, Dugald Ross, to cut the fossil slab out of the rock with a diamond-tipped saw. But as Ross got to work, the team quickly realized that the fossil wasn’t just a jaw, or even just a skull. It was most of the animal’s skeleton.
To give the frail bones the best chance of surviving as the waters rose, the researchers covered the fossil in consolidant, crossed their fingers, and hoped it would withstand the water. The tactic worked, and the team ultimately carried the 400-pound slab away in a wheelbarrow the following evening.
For more than two years, Jagielska carefully measured the pterosaur’s bones and compared them against those of known pterosaurs. The Skye pterosaur, in many respects, resembled the well-knownTo figure out the pterosaur’s wingspan, Jagielska measured the wing bones of better-known related species and worked out the relationship between those individual bones’ lengths and the animals’ overall wingspans. She then used this relationship to predict’s wingspan as between 2.2 and 3.