Australia is known to be well served for most species terrifying fauna, but at least one variety of prehistoric predators is underrepresented in the fossil record: the flying carnivorous dinosaurs known as pterosaurs. However, a new one paper published on 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, dubbed Haliskia petersensilived 100 million years ago, during the Albian stage of the Cretaceous period, and its discovery suggests that pterosaurs may have been more widespread down there 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, twelve ribs, two gastral, along with multiple phalanges, metatarsals, and digits. Study co-author Adele Pentland say“Haliskia is 22% complete, making it more than twice as complete as the only other known partial pterosaur skeleton found in Australia.”
The skeleton’s relative completeness allowed researchers to place it in the clade Anhangueriaand to speculate about his dietary habits. HaliskiaThe animal’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. .”
As with 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.
In the era when Haliskia When Australia was alive, it 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 article suggests that Haliskia’s discovery could change this: “The new Australian pterosaur is testament to the success of Anhangueria during the latest Early Cretaceous and suggests that the Australian forms were taxonomically more diverse and paleobiogeographically complex than previously recognized.”
