An international team of academic researchers led by Curtin University have provided a description of a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile, in the journal Scientific Reports found in Australia.
The fossilised reptile, Haliskia peterseni, Petersen’s sea phantom, which was found by and extracted by fossil enthusiast Kevin Petersen is believed to have lived around 100 million years ago in eastern Gondwana (now outside Richmond in Central Queensland).
In a report in the Conversation, the lead author of the paper, Curtin University PhD candidate, Adele Pentland described the fossil as only the second partial pterosaur skeleton ever found in Australia.
The pterosaur had a lightweight skeleton with hollow thin-walled bones for flight, that were often not preserved.
The preserved bones included a partial skull and complete mandible, bones that support the tongue and larynx, and parts of the skeleton below the head.
The bones and teeth suggest Petersen’s Sea phantom consumed fish and squid from a shallow inland sea known as Eromanga.
Senior Instrument scientist Dr Joseph Bevitt assisted the team with an analysis using thermal neutron tomography on the instrument Dingo at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering and complementary X-ray CT using the Imaging and Medical beamline at the Australian Synchrotron.
Read more on ANSTO website
Image: B–C are renders of a digital model generated from Dingo neutron scans.