SciTechDaily has a story about an exceptionally preserved pterosaur wing from Brazil. The animal lived about 113 million years ago, during the middle Cretaceous Period, in what is now northeastern Brazil. Its wing phalanx, which refers to the individual bone segments which make up the finger skeleton supporting the wing, was preserved in 3 dimensions with chemical traces that might provide clues to the its diet. The research “Multi-staged mineralization and biomarker preservation in a 113-million-year-old pterosaur bone via redox shifts in diagenesis” was published in the journal iScience. The paper is open access.

Lead author Kliti Grice, a John Curtin Distinguished Professor and founding Director of the Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin, said the findings reveal a new way to understand how some fossils form.

“This fossil is a true time capsule — not only is it beautifully preserved, but for the first time we’ve detected traces of steroids in a pterosaur, providing further evidence that these creatures likely fed on fish or squid,” Professor Grice said.

“It also marks the first time molecules have been recovered from a pterosaur fossil, revealing new clues about its diet and highlighting the growing potential of molecular paleontology to unlock secrets from deep time.