The Oldest Airborne Vertebrate Animal Was a Reptile With ‘Weird’ Wings #reptile #fossil #paleontology #permian

Scientists pulled this weigeltisaurid fossil out of an outcropping of copper shale in Germany in 1992. Now, Smithsonian paleontologists have fully described this animal, the oldest known vertebrate capable of gliding through air. Pritchard et al. 2021

Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the first flying vertebrate.  The fossil of Weigeltisaurus jaekeli was found in 1992 in Germany.  It lived during the Permian Period over 250 million years ago.  A new full analysis of the specimen was recently published in the journal PeerJ.  Where the researchers theorize that the bony rods supported winglike membranes for gliding, similar to some modern day squirrels. Interestingly, his species was first described in 1930 with other specimens known from England, Russia, and Madagascar.

The fossil hunter found the strange skeleton by splitting pieces of shale, cracking the fossil into two slabs. One slab ended up in the hands of a private collector and likely contains pieces of the reptile's bones. The other slab held most of the skeleton and landed in the collection of the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe, Germany. Scientists pinpointed the fossil in the second slab as a Weigeltisaurus, which was first described from another fossil in 1930, but the reptile's body shape still remained an enigma to paleontologists.  

Over the years, some researchers suggested that the long bones protruding from the specimen’s abdomen could have allowed the animal to glide through the air like a flying squirrel. But the skeleton in the fossil is curved in on itself and some bones are overlapping, making it hard to tell if they’re just ribs, or something else.