Skeleton and scaled Reconstruction of Venetoraptor gassenae. Credit: Caio Fantini
Phys.org has a story about a fossil find which sheds light on pterosaur evolution. A team of paleontologists have found an ancestor of pterosaurs in a fossil deposit in Brazil. The site is near Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and dates to about 230 million years ago in the Triassic Period. The team named a specimen Venetoraptor gassenae from a well preserved partial skeleton. The research was published in the journal Nature.
The fossil revealed a small, land-dwelling, four-legged, bipedal creature—likely standing no more than 0.3 meters at the hips and likely no more than a meter long. It also had a toothless beak reminiscent of those sported by modern raptors.
It also had big hands with scimitar-like claws. The researchers suggest that V. gassenae was likely a specialized creature. Its claws appear to have been used to climb trees or perhaps to capture prey. And it likely used its beak in much the same way modern raptors do—to feed, vocalize or even as part of sexual encounters.
The fossil was found in a rock layer in the Santa Maria Formation, which is located in the Paraná Basin—a site that hosts a large number of ancient fossils. Its age, the team notes, suggests that it lived alongside the earliest dinosaurs.
