The Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a new pterosaur discovered in the desert in Utah.  Its name is Caelestiventus hanseni (meaning Heavenly Wind) and it dates back to the Triassic, about 200 to 210 million years ago.  Pterosaurs first took to the air during the Triassic.  Hopefully, this specimen can shed some light on how that happened.   This fossil comes from a rock formation on public land in north-eastern Utah known as the Saints and Sinners Quarry.  During this time period, this area is believed to be an oasis in a massive dune covered desert.  There is a BYU press release and the original paper appeared in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“This one site we’ve pulled out 18,000 bones from an area the size of a good sized living room,” BYU’s Brooks Britt, the study’s lead author, tells Mary Halton at the BBC. “And there’s only one pterosaur.”

The amount of material is unprecedented. In most cases, researchers only find tiny or fragmentary fossils of pterosaurs, like a finger bone or vertebrae. But the new specimen likely died in soft sand or sediment that hardened into rock, keeping the specimen intact. “Most [pterosaur fossils] are heavily distorted; literally like roadkill,” Britt tells Halton. “The bones are so delicate, you can’t take them all the way out of the rock because they would just fall apart.”

The researchers didn’t completely dig out the pterosaur bits, instead leaving them encased in sandstone, getting 3-D images of the bones with a CAT-scan, which they used to make models of the fossils. The scans reveal some interesting info about the flying beast. The BBC reports that the fossil comes from a juvenile with a wingspan about five feet wide, likely the largest pterosaur of the era (in later times, pterosaurs would evolve to reach the size of small airplanes). The animal had 112 teeth and the size and shape of its brain indicates it could see well though its sense of smell was poor.