Scientists have found a unique fossil in the United States, indicating that the ancestors of pterosaurs spread over the planet 200 million years ago, long before the first feathered dinosaurs appeared. Their findings were presented in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“Our find shows that pterosaurs were found throughout the Earth and lived even in the most severe conditions, including in deserts, already at the end of the Triassic period. In addition, we can now say for sure that his descendants and distant relatives who lived on the islands in the future Britain survived the Triassic extinction,”says Brooks Britt of Brigham Young University in Provo (USA).
The first winged vertebrates - pterosaurs - are not dinosaurs and are not even closely related to them. As paleontologists today believe, they appeared at the end of the Triassic period, 220-210 million years ago, and at the same time they were close relatives of the ancestors of modern lizards.
Scientists still know where their ancestors lived. Some of them believe that these reptiles originally lived along the banks of rivers, while others suggest that this happened at a great distance from water bodies. The search for an answer to this question was complicated by the fact that the first pterosaurs, rhamphorhynchia with characteristic "tassel tails", were completely different from the later flying dinosaurs, and their remains rarely survived to this day in their original form.
Britt and his colleagues have opened another page in the history of the evolution of these lizards, studying the rocks of the late Triassic period, occurring in northeastern Utah. They formed about 208-201 million years ago during the so-called Retta era, during which there was another "great extinction" that killed all reptiles, except for the ancestors of dinosaurs, crocodiles and pterosaurs.
In the rocks of this time, found on the territory of the quarry of Saints and Sinners, scientists managed to find a perfectly preserved skeleton of a fairly large pterosaur. The span of its wings, according to scientists, reached about one and a half meters, and its mass was several tens of kilograms. Judging by the structure of his jaws and teeth, he hunted fish or small animals in the same way as modern pelicans do, capturing them in a bulky leather "bag".
Scientists named it Caelestiventus hanseni, which means Hansen's "sacred wind," after one of the government geologists who authorized Britt's team to excavate the quarry.
The discovery of this flying lizard was a great success for paleontologists for several reasons. Firstly, today on Earth there are only five dozen skeletons of pterosaurs that have survived to this day in their original form - the fragile bones of these flying reptiles are usually flattened and deformed during their fossilization.
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Second, the bones of Caelestiventus hanseni were found in the desert-covered part of America at the end of the Triassic period. As Britt notes, other remains of "desert" pterosaurs are noticeably younger - they date back to the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous.
Accordingly, the discovery of the remains of the "sacred wind" suggests that the pterosaurs have mastered all the ecosystems of the Earth literally several million years after their appearance, quickly capturing even the most severe and inconvenient corners of the planet.
This, according to the authors of the article, suggests that the transition to life in the air was a huge evolutionary advantage for the first pterosaurs and their descendants. Their unrivaled mobility helped them colonize the planet and survive the mass extinction that wiped out the lizardmen and many other ancient animals.