Paleontologists have discovered a cliffside in Utah brimming with fossils that offers a rare glimpse of ancient desert life in western North America.
Among the discoveries in what used to be a lake shoreline is a new pterosaur that would have been the largest flying reptile of its time. It wielded its ferocious teeth and powerful skull to gobble up small crocodile-type creatures.
“If you saw one of these things coming at you with its jaws open, it would freak you out of your mind,” said Brooks Britt, a Brigham Young University paleontologist, who this week presented preliminary findings at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Dallas.
He and fellow paleontologists plan to publish the findings in a scientific journal next year. Eight different animals, most likely new, have been identified at a site discovered in 2009 near Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border.
The discoveries include: a type of a strange-looking reptile with a head like a bird, arms like a mole and a claw on the tip of its tail, called a drepanosaur; several small crocodile-like creatures with armor on their backs, called sphenosuchians; two different types of meat-eating dinosaurs, one related to the coelophysis, a scrawny dinosaur featured in the movie Walking with Dinosaurs.
“It is a fantastic site,” said Brian Andres, a University of South Florida paleontologist, who heard the presentation this week. “It is in a time and a place that we really do not have a good record of.”
The pterosaur discovery is significant because it fills a gap in the fossil record between earlier, smaller pterosaurs and the giant ones that came later, Andres said.
It is similar to another wicked-jawed pterosaur discovered in England: the Dimorphodon.
Each side of its lower jaw had two fangs and 28 teeth.
“This thing is built like an aerial predator,” Andres said.
The skull and wing bone found are also noteworthy because they are intact, and not crushed, a rarity for pterosaurs.
It is the first known Triassic pterosaur found in North America, other than one unearthed in Greenland, Britt said.
“It is absurdly rare to find delicate, small skeletons from anywhere in time, anywhere in the world,” said Adam Pritchard, a Yale paleontologist, who is not part of the discovery team. “To have them from the Triassic period, which is the very beginning of the age of reptiles, is really unprecedented, especially in western North America.”
The site was discovered by paleontologists Dan Chure of Dinosaur National Monument and George Englemann of the University of Nebraska. Chure said the duo realized right away they had stumbled upon the discovery of their lives.
So far, they have found 11,500 bones — and they might be only halfway through getting them all out, he said.
The new pterosaur, yet to be named, was found last year by a university student carefully extracting fossils from a 136kg block of sandstone from the site.
“This is the best stuff I will ever see in my life,” said Britt, 60, who has been collecting dinosaur fossils for five decades. “It is like Christmas every day.”
The site has been named “Saints and Sinners,” a playful nod to the collaboration between Britt, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and non-Mormons Chure and Englemann.
“I am not sure we would exactly consider ourselves sinners, but it had a nice ring to it,” Chure said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS