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Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of a new flying dinosaur’s fossils on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Only one problem — most of the newly-discovered dinosaur species’ relatives seem to have lived in what is now China.
The newly-discovered species is called Ceoptera Evansae and researchers from the Natural History Museum in London, the University of Bristol, the University of Leicester, and the University of Liverpool have documented what they know about it in a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The discovered remains consisted of a partial skeleton of a single individual. This included parts of the shoulders, wings, legs and backbone.
The dinosaur belongs to the Darwinoptera clade of pterosaurs and its discovery has researchers now believing that the clade (an evolutionary grouping) was more diverse than previously thought and must have survived for more than 25 million years from the late Early jurassic period to the latest Jurassic period.
The rarity of pterosaur fossils from the Middle Jurassic period and their incompleteness has stopped scientists from better understanding the clade’s evolution, according to the University of Bristol. But this new discovery shows that some of the main Jurassic pterosaur groups evolved much before the end of the Early Jurassic period, which is much earlier than scientists held to be true. It also shows that pterosaurs survived well into the latest Jurassic, living alongside the dinosaurs that eventually evolved into modern birds.
“Ceoptera helps to narrow down the timing of several major events in the evolution of flying reptiles. Its appearance in the Middle Jurassic of the UK was a complete surprise, as most of its close relatives are from China. It shows that the advanced group of flying reptiles to which it belongs appeared earlier than we thought and quickly gained an almost worldwide distribution,” said Paul Barrett, senior author of the study, in a press statement.
