Newfound Aussie ‘dragon’ had a nearly 23-foot wingspan

Researchers have uncovered Australia’s largest flying reptile.

They discovered a fearsome pterosaur with an estimated seven-meter wingspan soared like a dragon above the ancient, vast inland sea that once covered much of outback Queensland, Australia.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a real-life dragon.”

The researchers analyzed a fossil of the creature’s jaw, discovered on Wanamara Country, near Richmond in North West Queensland.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a real-life dragon,” says Tim Richards, a PhD candidate from the Dinosaur Lab in the University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences who led the research team.

“The new pterosaur, which we named Thapunngaka shawi, would have been a fearsome beast, with a spear-like mouth and a wingspan around seven meters. It was essentially just a skull with a long neck, bolted on a pair of long wings.

“This thing would have been quite savage. It would have cast a great shadow over some quivering little dinosaurs who wouldn’t have heard them coming until it was too late.”

Richards says the skull alone would have been just over one meter (3.28 feet) long, containing around 40 teeth, perfectly suited to grasping the large predatory fishes known to inhabit Queensland’s no-longer-existent Eromanga Sea.

“Even though pterosaurs could fly, they were nothing like birds, or even bats,” Richards says. “Pterosaurs were a successful and diverse group of reptiles—the very first back-boned animals to take a stab at powered flight.”

The new species belonged to a group of pterosaurs known as anhanguerians, which inhabited every continent during the latter part of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Being perfectly adapted to powered flight, pterosaurs had thin-walled and relatively hollow bones. Given these adaptations their fossilized remains are rare and often poorly preserved.

“It’s quite amazing fossils of these animals exist at all,” Richards says. “By world standards, the Australian pterosaur record is poor, but the discovery of Thapunngaka contributes greatly to our understanding of Australian pterosaur diversity.”

It is only the third species of anhanguerian pterosaur known from Australia, with all three species hailing from western Queensland.

What is particularly striking about this new species of anhanguerian is the massive size of the bony crest on its lower jaw, which it presumably had on the upper jaw as well, says Steve Salisbury, Richard’s PhD supervisor and coauthor of the paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“These crests probably played a role in the flight dynamics of these creatures, and hopefully future research will deliver more definitive answers.”

Len Shaw, a local man who has been “scratching around” in the area for decades found the fossil in a quarry just northwest of Richmond in June 2011.

The name of the new species honors the First Nations peoples of the Richmond area where the fossil was found, incorporating words from the now-extinct language of the Wanamara Nation.

“The genus name, Thapunngaka, incorporates thapun [ta-boon] and ngaka [nga-ga], the Wanamara words for ‘spear’ and ‘mouth,’ respectively,” Salisbury says.

“The species name, shawi, honors the fossil’s discoverer Len Shaw, so the name means ‘Shaw’s spear mouth.'”

Source: University of Queensland

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