Paleontologists Discover One of North America's Earliest Flying Reptiles
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The oldest known pterosaur fossil ever found outside of Europe has just been discovered in Arizona, offering new insights into the flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago.
In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by paleontologist Ben Kligman, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, examine a fossilized jawbone of the new species.
The gull-sized pterosaur was found at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona along with hundreds of other fossils dating back 209 million years—to the late Triassic period,—filling a gap in the fossil record just before the end-Triassic extinction.
An artist's impression of the newly identified pterosaur Eotephradactylus mcintirea
An artist's impression of the newly identified pterosaur Eotephradactylus mcintirea
Brian Engh
From what the researchers were able to gather, the new species of pterosaur—dubbed Eotephradactylus mcintireae after Suzanne McIntire, the FossiLab volunteer who discovered it—was small enough to comfortably perch on a person's shoulder. It likely fed on the site's fish.
These findings, unearthed from the Owl Rock Member that outcrops in a remote and less explored area of the site, reveal that at that time older animals like giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives lived alongside newer species such as early frogs, turtles and pterosaurs.
"The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities where we start seeing groups that thrive later in the Mesozoic living alongside these older animals that don't make it past the Triassic," Kligman said in a statement.
"Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals actually lived together."
Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow and paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, quarrying a bonebed in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park in 2025.
Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow and paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, quarrying a bonebed in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park in 2025.
Ben Kligman, Smithsonian.
Back in 2011, a team co-led by research geologist Kay Behrensmeyer, the National Museum of Natural History's curator of vertebrate paleontology, was exploring challenging terrain when they came across the fossil rich bonebed, which turned out to be preserving an entire Triassic ecosystem.
"That's the fun thing about paleontology: you go looking for one thing, and then you find something else that's incredible that you weren't expecting," said Kligman, who began working on this site as part of his doctorate in 2018.
Volunteers working on fossils from a Petrified Forest National Park bonebed in the FossiLab on view to museumgoers in the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time at the Smithsonian's National Museum of...
Volunteers working on fossils from a Petrified Forest National Park bonebed in the FossiLab on view to museumgoers in the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. More
Ben Kligman, Smithsonian.
Scientists believe that during the Triassic period, this part of Arizona was an arid place positioned in the middle of Pangaea right above the equator, later submerged by a flood that likely buried all the creatures preserved in the bonebed.
Among the creatures unearthed at the site was also an ancient turtle with spike-like armor and shell, which at the same time was also present in Germany. This discovery suggests that turtles dispersed rapidly across Pangaea, despite their size and speed.
Do you have a science story to share with Newsweek? Do you have a question about fossils? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Reference
Kligman, B. T., Whatley, R. L., Ramezani, J., Marsh, A. D., Lyson, T. R., Fitch, A. J., Parker, W. G., & Behrensmeyer, A. K. (2025). Unusual bone bed reveals a vertebrate community with pterosaurs and turtles in equatorial Pangaea before the end-Triassic extinction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2505513122
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