This illustration is an artist's interpretation of what a toothed pterosaur may have looked like 100 million years ago. (University of Portsmouth)
This illustration represents an artist's interpretation of what a toothless pterosaurs would have looked like 100 million years ago. (University of Portsmouth)
Smithsonian Magazine has an article about the recent discovery of not 1. not 2, but 4 new species of pterosaur. These animals were found in the famous Kem Kem fossil beds in southeastern Morocco. They lived about 100 million years ago during the middle Cretaceous Period. All the details are in a paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
These leathery-winged predators, part of an extinct group known as pterosaurs, were excavated from the Kem Kem fossil beds in southeastern Morocco. Three new species of toothed pterosaur, all part of the Ornithocheiridae family, identified from chunks of jaws studded with pointed teeth, were first reported last month in the journal Cretaceous Research. A fourth pterosaur, Afrotapejara zouhrii, which had no teeth, is the first of its kind found on African soil, identified by part of its skull, according to a University of Portsmouth statement.
“These new finds provide an important window into the world of African pterosaurs,” Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist from the University of Detroit Mercy, says in a statement. “We know so much more about pterosaurs from places like Europe and Asia, so describing new specimens from Africa is always very exciting.”
Researchers hypothesize these soaring hunters had 13-feet-wide wingspans, and snatched fish with their sharp teeth, forming part of an ancient river ecosystem that included crocodiles, turtles and predatory dinosaurs. The fourth species, Afrotapejara zouhrii, would have been similar in size, but toothless with a large crest on the front of its skull.
None of these pterosaurs would have weighed much despite their size. Like modern birds, their bones were thin and hollow, allowing the flying reptiles to reach large sizes without becoming too heavy to take off. But this flight adaptation makes pterosaur skeletons less likely to fossilize intact, leaving them scarce in the fossil record.
The three chunks of jaw bone from the toothed pterosaurs resemble existing specimens found in Brazil and England, leading researchers to tentatively place them in the genera Anhanguera, Ornithocheirus and Coloborhynchus, respectively.
