Illustration of the newly identified species, Haliskia petersenii
Gabriel Ugueto
A 100-million-year-old pterosaur fossil discovered in Australia may have had the largest, most muscular tongue of its kind.
The fossil was discovered in 2021 by Kevin Pietersen, curator at Kronosaurus Corner, a museum near the Queensland outback town of Richmond.
Typically, with a pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived on Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs, you’d find just one bone, Petersen said. “But as we started digging, we started finding more and more bones, and we realized we had to work very carefully,” he said.
Nearly a quarter of the skeleton has been recovered, making it the most complete pterosaur yet discovered by Australian scientists.
The entire lower jaw, part of the upper jaw, vertebrae, ribs, leg and foot bones were preserved, but most surprising was the preservation of an extremely delicate throat bone, just a few millimetres in diameter, which Petersen says reminded him of spaghetti.
Lead team Adele Pentland Researchers from Curtin University in Perth identified the fossil as belonging to an entirely new genus and species of pterosaur in the Anhangeria family, which are found around the world. The creature had an estimated wingspan of 4.6 metres. In Petersen’s honour, the fossil has been named “Anhangeria”. Haliskia petersenii.
Though it wasn’t related to any bird, Petersen said it would have looked a bit like a giant pelican, but Pentland said it would have been a “devil pelican” because of its mouth full of sharp teeth.
What sets it up H. Petersenyi What sets this dinosaur apart from other known pterosaurs is that it had much larger throat bones, indicating it had a huge, muscular tongue, Pentland said.
The team believes that the tongue was used to capture and hold prey, possibly slippery animals such as squid or fish. Once the prey was grasped in the jaws, H. Petersenyi Pentland says the dinosaur’s teeth would have closed like a zipper or cage, preventing escape.
Like pelicans, it likely swallowed its prey whole, she says, and its tongue would have also been used to shove the food down its throat.
In the Cretaceous H. Petersenyi At the time, what is now inland Queensland was covered by sea, which served as hunting grounds for pterosaurs.
“It’s truly breathtaking to look at the remains of these fossil animals and imagine the wealth of life that must have been there at that time and how different it must have been to what we see in outback Queensland today,” Pentland says.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
