![]() Just like with birds, he said, there's a "pretty huge" variation even with the same species and there's not enough of the animal to know much more. What did the Dinosaur Cove pterosaurs really look like?ĭid they have fangs or other kinds of teeth? Short skulls or a long ones? Did they sport crests on their heads? Still, the discovery raises more questions than it answers. "This is a great reward from that tremendously painstaking study." "Dinosaur Cove is a really difficult quarry to work, and Tom and Pat and their colleagues have mined it for decades with amazing results," said Professor Padian, who was not involved in the study Kevin Padian, curator of the University of California's Museum of Paleontology, said the latest research deserved "tremendous praise". ![]() They're very light and thin and that doesn't hold up well over millions of years. Mr Richards is doing a PhD in the taxonomy and diversity of Australian pterosaurs and said one challenge in studying pterosaurs is their bones don't preserve well. Tim Richards with the model of a skull of a pterosaur from South Africa. This takes energy from actually growing, which is why pterosaurs slow in growth before they mature, he added. "You have to start regulating your own body temperature, find your own food and fend off predators," Mr Richards said. What we know already is that pterosaurs are ready to fly very soon after hatching but there is a downside to that. He said the latest find would help in efforts to understand how pterosaurs grew up. We knew they existed but we've never described one from Australia before," said Mr Richards, who was not involved in the latest research. "For the first time we've found a juvenile pterosaur. Tim Richards, University of Queensland's 'Dino Lab', which discovered the beast with a 7-metre wingspan welcomed the evidence of Australia's first polar pterosaur, and its youngest pterosaur. Yet neither of these are as old as the bones in the latest analysis. The two Dinosaur Cove pterosaurs were both smaller than Ferrodraco lentoni, which was estimated to have a 4-metre wingspan. The well-preserved fossil, which was found in Queensland, included several partial vertebrae, limb bones, part of the jaw and skull, and 40 teeth. In 2019, Ms Pentland described a new species of Australian pterosaur called Ferrodraco lentoni, which had a wingspan of 4 metres. ![]() The largest pterosaur reported in Australia so far is the Thapunngaka shawi, with a wingspan of around 7 metres, described in 2021 by University of Queensland researchers. ![]() The worldwide record holder is Quetzalcoatlus northropi, discovered in Texas, North America, with a wingspan of 10 –11 metres. "In spite of that, there were temperate forests inhabited by herbivorous dinosaurs, meat-eating theropod dinosaurs and pterosaurs." Not the biggest - but oldest, youngest and coldestĪ pterosaur with a 2-metre wingspan is by no means the biggest. "When these animals were alive, Victoria was much further south than it is today and it was within the polar circle," Ms Pentland said. The fossils are also rare because their location means the animals would have have experienced long dark polar winters. Still, this is the first evidence of a juvenile pterosaur to be found in Australia, and the first pterosaur remains to be found in Victoria. "I wasn't able to figure out where these sat in the family tree," she said. Ms Pentland did not have enough material to say too much more about these animals. The juvenile wing bone (top) is much smaller than the other adult wing bones. ![]()
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