Latest news with #BrianEngh
IOL News
15-07-2025
- Science
- IOL News
Discovery of North America's oldest Pterosaur at Petrified Forest National Park
An artist's reconstruction of the newly discovered species of pterosaur at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, where the fossil was discovered. Image: Brian Engh/Smithsonian Institution At a remote bone bed in Arizona, dense with fossils dating back around 209 million years, a Smithsonian-led team of researchers has discovered North America's oldest known pterosaur, according to a news release. Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to develop powered flight, soaring above dinosaurs and other surreal creatures that called the prehistoric world home. The finding, detailed in an article in PNAS published Monday, offers clues to the evolution of the winged reptiles, which have more than 150 named species, including the Hollywood favourite - the pterodactyl. Before the study, there were only two known Triassic pterosaurs from North America, Ben Kligman, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and an author on the study, said in an email. This is the only early pterosaur globally whose precise age has been determined. - information that is crucial to understanding 'how a fossil animal fits into patterns of evolutionary and environmental change,' he said. Suzanne McIntire, formerly a volunteer with the museum, unearthed the fossil. 'What was exciting about uncovering this specimen was that the teeth were still in the bone, so I knew the animal would be much easier to identify,' she said in a statement. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad Loading Suzanne McIntire, a longtime volunteer at the Smithsonian's FossiLab, discovered the new pterosaur fossil before her retirement last year. The new species was named in her honor. Image: Bill King/Smithsonian Institution The pterosaur's jaw holds worn-down teeth, suggesting it ate fish with armored scales, and the creature 'would have been small enough to comfortably perch on a person's shoulder,' according to the release. The new species is called the 'ash-winged dawn goddess,' but it could also be considered a small nightmare for anyone imagining a winged reptile on their shoulder. Regardless, it's a noteworthy discovery from the Petrified Forest National Park site, from which teams at the museum have uncovered more than 1,200 individual fossils, including fish scales, teeth and fossilized poop. The fossils offer a window into a vibrant, bygone ecosystem, where animals such as giant amphibians, some up to six feet long, and armored crocodile relatives lived among 'evolutionary upstarts' such as frogs, turtles and pterosaurs. 'Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals actually lived together,' Kligman said. Among the findings was an ancient turtle 'with spike-like armor and a shell that could fit inside a shoebox,' the news release says. It's believed to have lived around the same time as the oldest known turtle, suggesting the creatures spread across the supercontinent Pangaea quickly. 'Surprising for an animal that is not very large and is likely walking at a slow pace,' Kligman noted. Kay Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, documents a bone bed at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona on May 23, 2023. Image: Ben Kligman/Smithsonian Institution Contrary to common belief, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs - their name comes from 'winged lizard' in Greek. Some were the size of paper airplanes while others were as big as fighter jets and feasted on baby dinosaurs. They went extinct around 66 million years ago. The early evolution of pterosaurs is something of a mystery as they appeared in the fossil record some 215 million years ago with fully evolved wings, Kligman noted. Bones of pterosaurs from the Triassic era, about 251.9 to 201.3 million years ago, are also small, thin and often hollow, so they are easily destroyed before fossilization. Scientists have named the newly discovered pterosaur Eotephradactylus mcintireae. The genus name, Eotephradactylus, refers to Eos, the goddess of dawn; tephra translates to ash, and dactyl refers to the fingerlike wings - referencing volcanic ash at the site of its discovery and the animals' position near the base of the pterosaur's evolutionary tree. The species name is a callback to its discoverer, McIntire. The unearthed fossil is 'one of the only early pterosaurs whose anatomy can be observed in a detailed way in three dimensions,' Kligman said. Its teeth are especially noteworthy as they're fused into the socket, a feature shared with small, slender Triassic reptiles known as lagerpetids, a group which some hypothesize may be closely related to pterosaurs. Kligman called the setting of the finding, which he described as 'a river system flowing through the arid sub-tropical floodplains of central Pangaea,' unusual for early pterosaurs, and said there may be similar river deposits from other Triassic rocks that can also preserve pterosaur bones. He said they hope 'this creates a new search-image for filling gaps in the early evolution of pterosaurs.'
CTV News
12-07-2025
- Science
- CTV News
‘It could have sat on your shoulder': Scientists discover North America's oldest pterosaur
An artist's reconstruction of the fossilized landscape, plants and animals found preserved in a remote bonebed in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. (Illustration by Brian Engh) A team led by the Smithsonian has discovered North America's oldest known pterosaur—a small, seagull-sized flying reptile that lived more than 200 million years ago in what is now Arizona. According to the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fossil was found in a remote part of Petrified Forest National Park. It includes part of the animal's jaw and a wing bone, dating back to nearly 209 million years ago, making it the earliest known pterosaur from the continent. 'There are two other Triassic pterosaur fossils from the North American continent, one from Greenland and one from Utah, but they're both younger than the one we found,' Ben Kligman, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in a video interview with The new species is named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, meaning 'ash-winged dawn goddess,' referring to the volcanic ash that helped preserve it in an ancient riverbed. 'The animal itself would have been the size of a small seagull, so it could have sat on your shoulder,' Kligman said adding that it likely fed on armoured fish in the river system it once flew over. pterosaur Kay Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in Petrified Forest National Park documenting the geology of a bonebed in 2023. 'The teeth in the jaw of this pterosaur … all are worn down,' he explained. 'It means that this pterosaur was eating something with a hard skeleton or hard bony parts, and the fish that were living in this river system … would be covered by an armoured skin.' The find sheds light on a time just before a mass extinction wiped out three-quarters of the world's species and set the stage for dinosaurs to dominate. The fossil was uncovered with more than 1,200 other specimens, including bones from ancient amphibians, one of the world's oldest turtles and a crocodile relative. Most early pterosaur fossils have been found in Europe and are flattened by pressure from layers of ocean sediment, but the Arizona discovery was preserved in three dimensions, allowing scientists to study fine details like tooth placement and replacement teeth growing inside the jaw. pterosaur Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow and paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, quarrying a bonebed in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park in 2025. '(They are) animals that could fly, so their bones are oftentimes hollow, and they are difficult to collect,' Kligman said. 'If you have a tiny two-centimetres-long little hollow bone, it's really easy for it to break apart … and it's hard to even recognize the fossil.' Kligman says similar fossils are likely across the world because pterosaurs could fly, so they didn't have barriers to their dispersal. He hopes the modern scanning techniques that his team used can open the door for more discoveries in similar riverbed deposits. 'We're hoping through showing a methodology for finding, collecting, preparing and then CT scanning these bones, (we can) open a pathway for us and other researchers to reexamine these Triassic river deposits and hopefully find more pterosaurs.'
CTV News
08-07-2025
- Science
- CTV News
Arizona fossils reveal an ecosystem in flux early in the age of dinosaurs
An artist's rendering of the the site of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Brian Engh/Handout WASHINGTON -- Scientists have unearthed in Arizona fossils from an assemblage of animals, including North America's oldest-known flying reptile, that reveal a time of transition when venerable lineages that were destined soon to vanish lived alongside newcomers early in the age of dinosaurs. The remains of the pterosaur, roughly the size of a small seagull, and the other creatures were discovered in Petrified Forest National Park, a place famous for producing fossils of plants and animals from the Triassic Period including huge tree trunks. The newly found fossils are 209 million years old and include at least 16 vertebrate species, seven of them previously unknown. The Triassic came on the heels of Earth's biggest mass extinction 252 million years ago, and then ended with another mass extinction 201 million years ago that wiped out many of the major competitors to the dinosaurs, which achieved unquestioned supremacy in the subsequent Jurassic period. Both calamities apparently were caused by extreme volcanism. The fossils, entombed in rock rich with volcanic ash, provide a snapshot of a thriving tropical ecosystem crisscrossed by rivers on the southern edge of a large desert. Along with the pterosaur were other new arrivals on the scene including primitive frogs, lizard-like reptiles and one of the earliest-known turtles - all of them resembling their relatives alive today. This ecosystem's largest meat-eaters and plant-eaters were part of reptile lineages that were flourishing at the time but died out relatively soon after. While the Triassic ushered in the age of dinosaurs, no dinosaurs were found in this ecosystem, illustrating how they had not yet become dominant. 'Although dinosaurs are found in contemporaneous rocks from Arizona and New Mexico, they were not part of this ecosystem that we are studying,' said paleontologist Ben Kligman of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, who led the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'This is peculiar, and may have to do with dinosaurs preferring to live in other types of environments,' Kligman added. This ecosystem was situated just above the equator in the middle of the bygone supercontinent called Pangaea, which later broke apart and gave rise to today's continents. Pterosaurs, cousins of the dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, followed much later by birds and bats. Pterosaurs are thought to have appeared roughly 230 million years ago, around the same time as the earliest dinosaurs, though their oldest-known fossils date to around 215 million years ago in Europe. The newly identified pterosaur, named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, is thought to have hunted fish populating the local rivers. Its partial skeleton includes part of a tooth-studded lower jaw, some additional isolated teeth and the bones of its elongated fingers, which helped form its wing apparatus. Its wingspan was about three feet (one metre) and its skull was about four inches (10 cm) long. It had curved fangs at the front of its mouth for grabbing fish as it flew over rivers and blade-like teeth in the back of the jaw for slicing prey. The researchers said Eotephradactylus would have had a tail, as all the early pterosaurs did. Eotephradactylus means 'ash-winged dawn goddess,' recognizing the nature of the rock in which it was found and the position of the species near the beginning of the pterosaur lineage. Mcintireae recognizes Suzanne McIntire, the former Smithsonian fossil preparator who unearthed it. The turtle was a land-living species while the lizard-like reptile was related to New Zealand's modern-day Tuatara. Also found were fossils of some other reptiles including armored plant-eaters, a large fish-eating amphibian and various fish including freshwater sharks. The ecosystem's biggest predators were croc relatives perhaps 20 feet (six meters) long, bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs inhabiting that part of the world at the time. On land was a four-legged meat-eating reptile from a group called rauisuchians. In the rivers dwelled a semi-aquatic carnivore from a group called phytosaurs, built much like a crocodile but with certain differences, such as nostrils at the top of the head rather than the end of the snout. Rauisuchians, phytosaurs and some other lineages represented in the fossils disappeared in the end-Triassic extinction event. Frogs and turtles are still around today, while pterosaurs dominated the skies until the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ended the age of dinosaurs. 'The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities,' Kligman said. Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien, Reuters
