An artist’s reconstruction of the fossilized landscape, plants and animals found preserved in a remote bonebed in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. (IMAGE)
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An artist’s reconstruction of the fossilized landscape, plants and animals found preserved in a remote bonebed in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
In a paper published today, July 7, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by paleontologist Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, present the fossilized jawbone of a new pterosaur species and describe the sea gull-sized flying reptile along with hundreds of other fossils they unearthed from the site. These fossils, which date back to the late Triassic period around 209 million years ago, preserve a snapshot of a dynamic ecosystem where older groups of animals lived with evolutionary upstarts.
The newly described pterosaur Eotephradactylus mcintireae is seen eating an ancient ray-finned fish alongside an early species of turtle and an early frog species, with the skeleton of an armored crocodile relative lying on the ground and a palm-like plant growing in the background.
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Illustration by Brian Engh.
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