Discovered 115 years ago, the ancient creature posed a paleontological puzzle that new X-ray scans have solved
began in 2018, when he joined the National Museums Scotland to study a group of Triassic fossils called the Elgin reptiles, so named because they hail from the rocks near the Scottish town of Elgin.
But in the early Triassic period that followed, life rebounded and rapidly diversified, setting the stage for today’s groups of land vertebrates. “Nature just went experimental—you can see it was just trying new things, it just went off the rails,” says paleontologist Natalia Jagielska, a Ph.D. candidate at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh who wasn’t involved with the study.
The creature’s ribs were longer than previous studies had recorded; so were its forelimbs and tail. Foffa could reconstruct an entire hand and foot that hadn’t been seen before. And crucially, Foffa could see the ends ofMaking sense of the pterosaurs has joined the lagerpetids’ ranks, the fossil can help scientists make sense of the pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight.
As a result, there was a roughly 30-million-year gap in the fossil record of pterosaurs’ origins. The oldest known pterosaurs, which lived some 220 million years ago, were fully formed fliers, providing little hint of what came before. Ezcurra’s 2020 discovery that lagerpetids were a sister group to pterosaurs narrowed that gap to about 18 million years.nor any other lagerpetid has elongated fourth fingers, which are how pterosaurs supported their wings.
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