CA College Alumni Discovers New Flying Dinosaur-Like Species

The fossils of a new dinosaur-like species have been unearthed by a paleontologist who is a Bay Area graduate, according to the Smithsonian and a research paper published on July 7.

A research team led by Ben Kligman — a 2016 Integrative Biology graduate of UC Berkeley — has discovered the oldest known pterosaur in North America, a winged reptile that once glided above dinosaurs during the Triassic Period.

These reptiles were also the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight, according to a news release from the Smithsonian.

The fossils were found at a remote bonneted in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Kligman, who is now a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, presented a fossilized jawbone of the new species alongside his team this month.

Kligman began working on this site as part of his doctorate in 2018.

The sea gull-sized pterosaur was presented with hundreds of other fossils, including one of the world's oldest turtle fossils, in a paper published earlier this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the Smithsonian, the newly identified pterosaur is among the oldest of its kind ever discovered outside Europe. Roughly the size of a bird, the winged reptile could have perched comfortably on a person’s shoulder.

The fossil was discovered by Suzanne McIntire, a longtime volunteer preparator who spent 18 years working in the museum’s FossiLab.

“What was exciting about uncovering this specimen was that the teeth were still in the bone, so I knew the animal would be much easier to identify,” McIntire said.

The pterosaur’s jaw, lined with teeth, offered key insights into its lifestyle. The worn tips of the teeth suggest it likely fed on the site’s heavily armored fish.

The pterosaur and other fossils found date back to a period around 209 million years ago and "preserve a snapshot of a dynamic ecosystem" where older groups of animals, including giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives, lived with "evolutionary upstarts" like frogs, turtles and pterosaurs, according to the Smithsonian.

“Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals actually lived together," Kligman said.

This new site is helping fill a gap in the fossil record that came before the extinction of creatures that lived during the Triassic era. About 201.5 million years ago, volcanic eruptions dramatically altered global climates and wiped out about 75% of the species living on Earth. This calamity cleared the way for dinosaurs to diversify and take over ecosystems around the world.

The team named the newly discovered pterosaur species "Eotephradactylus Mcintireae." The genus name, meaning “ash-winged dawn goddess,” nods to both the volcanic ash at the excavation site and the creature’s early place in pterosaur evolution. The species name honors its discoverer, McIntire, who retired last year.

Findings like these are important and typically only present themselves every so often.

In 2011, a team co-led by research geologist Kay Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, ventured into the region’s harsh badlands — habitat to rattlesnakes and wild horses — in search of fossils from prehistoric mammal precursors. Instead, she and her team uncovered a bonebed 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.