With at least 480 teeth, this pterosaur had a smile that would make any mom proud.
Some were small, while others weren’t. Some possessed wide wings, and some possessed slimmer, slenderer ones. Some were stuck with an awkward slouching posture, whereas others stood upright and walked, waded and swam whenever they weren’t soaring through the sky. And while some of these
benefitted from an abundance of tiny teeth, others boasted a smattering of big ones or no teeth at all.Now, a team of paleontologists has found another pterosaur species in the same formation of limestone as the first, though the new specimen has a smile unlike any other. “The jaws of this pterosaur are really long and lined with small fine, hooked teeth, with tiny spaces between them,” says David Martill, a study author and a paleontologist from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, according to a. “And what’s even more remarkable is some of the teeth have a hook on the end, which we’ve never seen before in a pterosaur ever.
According to the team, this abundance of hooked teeth helped the animal snatch shrimp and other small species out of the shallows of“These small hooks would have been used to catch the tiny shrimp the pterosaur likely fed on — making sure they went down its throat and weren’t squeezed between the teeth,” Martill says in the same press release.
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This Pterosaur Had at Least 480 Hooked TeethWith at least 480 teeth, this pterosaur had a smile that would make any mom proud.
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