LiveScience has a story about a cousin to both dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Kongonaphon kely, meaning "tiny bug slayer", lived about 237 million years ago, during the Triassic period, in what is now Madagascar. It was discovered in 1998, but just recently described in a paper that appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The pipsqueak's fossils were discovered in the Morondava Basin of southwestern Madagascar in 1998 by a group of researchers, led by study co-researcher John Flynn, the Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City (at the time Flynn worked at the Field Museum in Chicago). An analysis of its anatomy revealed that K. kely belongs to the scientific clade called Ornithodira, whose members are the last common ancestors of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and their descendants.
The early Ornithodira, however, are poorly known, because there are few known specimens like K. kely that date to the beginning of this lineage.
"It took some time before we could focus on these bones, but once we did, it was clear we had something unique and worth a closer look," Flynn said.
K. kely is one of the smallest non-avian ornithodirans on record. Other known early Ornithodira specimens are also small, but previously these critters were thought to be "isolated exceptions to the rule," Kammerer said.
