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Largest Pterosaur From Jurassic Unearthed In Scotland
Live Science
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5/18/2025
Paleontologists on the Isle of Skye in Scotland have unearthed the largest pterosaur known from the Jurassic period.
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00:00
I'm Steve Brussati.
00:01
I'm a paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
00:05
And we are very excited about this new fossil discovery.
00:09
It's the skeleton of a pterosaur.
00:12
So one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying around back when the dinosaurs
00:17
were living.
00:18
Pterosaurs are fascinating.
00:19
They're the largest flying vertebrates and fish vertebrates to ever take to the skies.
00:24
All pterosaurs are stored above the warm waters of Scotland and fed on fishes and squids.
00:29
That's why it has enormous, well-defined teeth and fangs.
00:32
It's a new species.
00:33
We call it Yark Skienok.
00:35
That's a Scottish Gaelic name and that pays homage to where it was found here in Scotland
00:40
on the Isle of Skye.
00:42
Scotland back then was a very different environment.
00:46
It got moot warmer and humid.
00:47
It was almost tropical.
00:49
Think Canary Islands or something like that.
00:52
The waters were shallow, swimming with enormous dolphin-like athiosauruses and filth of squids
00:56
and amulites.
00:57
The lands were swarming with meat-eating dinosaurs, similar to Tannosaurus rex, but much smaller,
01:02
and plated stegosaurus and long-necked cyropods.
01:05
So variety of animals, you know, from your dinosaur textbooks.
01:09
It's an exquisite skeleton.
01:11
The bones are preserved in three dimensions.
01:13
It's 170 million years old, give or take, and it's big.
01:19
This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters.
01:22
That is generally the size of the largest birds today.
01:25
So already, way back in the Jurassic period, these pterosaurs were getting much larger than
01:31
we used to think.
01:33
One of the most interesting things about this skeleton is that when we looked inside the bones
01:37
at the growth marks, we actually found that it wasn't fully grown.
01:40
This was a sub-adult animal and it still had the capacity to get much larger before it perished.
01:45
We discovered the fossil in 2017 on an expedition that we did to the Isle of Skye.
01:51
It was a University of Edinburgh expedition funded by National Geographic.
01:55
And one of our students, Amelia Penney, she found the fossil out at a site on the coast
02:02
at low tide.
02:03
She saw the jawbones basically sticking out of the rock.
02:07
And we realized as we started to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws
02:12
that that head led to a skeleton.
02:15
We had to battle the tides to collect it.
02:17
We almost lost the fossil.
02:19
We had to let it go, to let the tide lap over it.
02:23
And we had to worry for several hours, come back nearly at midnight to collect it, and thankfully
02:29
it was still there.
02:30
And then for the last five years or so, we've been studying it here at the University of Edinburgh.
02:37
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