North America’s oldest known pterosaur — a creature roughly the size of a modern-day gull — would have glided over the tropical forests and braided rivers of equatorial Pangea, likely dining on fish and mingling with six-foot amphibians.
This ancient flying reptile has been named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, meaning “ash-winged dawn goddess” — a reference to its place near the base of the pterosaur’s family tree. The species was described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences following the discovery of a fossilized jawbone buried within the volcanic ash of Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.
Pterosaurs were a clade of flying reptiles that appeared in the Late Triassic Period. They were the first vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight and would have commanded the skies tens of millions of years before birds. These winged beasts lived alongside the likes of the tyrannosaurus and triceratops, but (unlike birds) were not ...
