New species of flying dinosaur found in Australia

Australia is known for being well served with most species of fearsome fauna, but at least one type of prehistoric predator is underrepresented in its fossil record: the flying carnivorous dinosaurs known as pterosaurs. However, a new paper published June 12 in Scientific Reports describes a fossilized skeleton found in the Australian state of Queensland that belongs to a previously unknown species of pterosaur. The new species, called Haliskia petersensi, lived 100 million years ago, during the Albian stage of the Cretaceous Period, and its discovery suggests that pterosaurs may have been more widespread in Lower Time than previously thought. The new discovery is exciting for a number of reasons. It represents a previously unknown species, it comes from a continent that has yielded relatively few pterosaur fossils, and it is far more complete than any previous specimen found in Australia. The skeleton includes part of the creature’s skull, the entire lower jaw, two vertebrae, 12 ribs, two gastralia, along with several phalanges, metatarsals, and digits. Study co-author Adele Pentland said: “Haliskia is 22% complete, making it more than twice as complete as the only other known partial pterosaur skeleton found in Australia.” The relative completeness of the skeleton allowed researchers to place it in the clade Anhangueria and speculate about its feeding habits. Haliskia’s skeleton dates from a time when much of Queensland was underwater, and the creature appears to have hunted its prey in these waters. The article speculates that, given the shape of its teeth, it likely fed on “soft invertebrates (probably cephalopods) and/or other smooth prey.” Researchers estimate its wingspan at 4.6 meters, or just over 15 feet, and deduce from the shape of its skull and jaw that it “possessed a strong, muscular tongue… which aided in the immobilization of live, smooth prey animals against the prominent palatal border. .” Like the vast majority of other pterosaur bones found in Australia, Haliskia comes from a region of Australia known as the Toolebuc Formation, a long stretch of Cretaceous rock stretching across Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia . The skeleton was excavated by Kevin Petersen, the curator of a local museum called Kronosaurus Korner, and was named after him. During the era in which Haliskia lived, Australia remained part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which also included modern South America, Africa, Antarctica, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. However, the supercontinent was separating and slowly splitting into the continents we know today. Although pterosaur fossils have been found on all continents that once formed Gondwana, there is a clear difference between the parts that formed the eastern part of the supercontinent (Australia, along with New Zealand, Antarctica, Indo-Pakistan and Madagascar) and those parts that made up the West. The authors write: “Pterosaur fossils are rare in eastern Gondwana, in stark contrast to their relative abundance and diversity in western Gondwana.” This has made it difficult to draw conclusions about how widespread pterosaurs might have been in these regions. The paper suggests that the discovery of Haliskia could change this: “The new Australian pterosaur testifies to the success of Anhangueria during the latest Early Cretaceous and suggests that Australian forms were taxonomically more diverse and paleobiogeographically complex than previously recognized.”