00:00I'm Steve Brussati. I'm a paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and we are very excited about this new fossil discovery.
00:09It's the skeleton of a pterosaur. So one of those pterodactyls, those reptiles that were flying around back when the dinosaurs were living.
00:18Pterosaurs are fascinating. They're the largest flying vertebrates and fish vertebrates to ever take to the skies.
00:24Pterosaurs are above the warm waters of Scotland and fed on fishes and squids. That's why it has enormous well-defined teeth and fangs.
00:32It's a new species. We call it Yark-Scienach. That's the Scottish Gallic name and that pays homage to where it was found here in Scotland on the Isle of Skye.
00:44Scotland back then was a very different environment. It got much warmer and humid. It was almost tropical. Think Canary Islands or something like that.
00:51The waters were shallow, swimming with enormous dolphin-like pterosauruses and filled with squids and amulites.
00:57The lands were swarming with meat-eating dinosaurs, similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, but much smaller, and plated stegosauruses and long-necked cyropods.
01:05So variety of animals you know from your dinosaur textbooks.
01:09It's an exquisite skeleton. The bones are preserved in three dimensions. It's 170 million years old, give or take, and it's big.
01:19This animal had a wingspan of over 2.5 meters. That is generally the size of the largest birds today.
01:25So already, way back in the Jurassic period, these pterosaurs were getting much larger than we used to think.
01:33One of the most interesting things about this skeleton is that when we looked inside the bones at the growth marks,
01:38we actually found that it wasn't fully grown. This was a sub-adult animal and it still had the capacity to get much larger before it perished.
01:45We discovered the fossil in 2017 on an expedition that we did to the Isle of Skye.
01:51It was a University of Edinburgh expedition funded by National Geographic.
01:55And one of our students, Amelia Penny, she found the fossil out at a site on the coast at low tide.
02:03She saw the jaw bones basically sticking out of the rock.
02:07And we realized as we started to cut this bone out of the rock using diamond tip saws that that head led to a skeleton.
02:15We had to battle the tides to collect it. We almost lost the fossil.
02:19We had to let it go, to let the tide lap over it.
02:23And we had to worry for several hours, come back nearly at midnight to collect it.
02:29And thankfully it was still there.
02:31And then for the last five years or so, we've been studying it here at the University of Edinburgh.
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