Fossil of a giant flying reptile discovered on a Scottish island

said Natalia Jagelska, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. She was the lead author of a research paper on the fossil published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

The fossil was discovered during a field trip in 2017, After a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, Amelia Penny, spotted her jaw protruding from a rock in the well-known Skye region. In Gaelic as Rubha nam Brathairean, or Brothers’ Point.

I have been given a pterosaur Gaelic name Dirk Sjiatanakh (pronounced jark ski-an-ash), which translates as “pterodactyl”.

“Derek is the largest pterosaur that we know from the Jurassic period, and that tells us that pterosaurs were much larger than we thought, long before the Cretaceous when they were competing with birds, which is very important.”

Anning, the unknown paleontology pioneer, discovered the 3-meter (9.8 feet) Plesiosaurus in Dorset, southern England, in 1823. The astonishing fossil, the first species found intact with its snake-like neck, stunned the world, unleashing dinos which dominated Victorian England and continues to this day.

Jagielska will continue to study the skeleton to understand how the ancient creature lived and flew.

“To achieve flight, pterosaurs had hollow bones with thin bony walls, which makes their remains incredibly fragile and unfit for[preservation]for millions of years,” she said.

“However, our skeleton, 160 million years after its death, is still in an almost primitive state, articulated and nearly complete…as if it had been alive only weeks ago.”