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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS