Flying Dinosaur With Head Like a Buffertly Wing Identified as Social Creature, Part of the Pterosaur Family
ByA newly identified fossil depicts a flying dinosaur that seems to better resemble an expressionist painting than an actual creature that once existed.
According to Live Science, the researchers that uncovered the fossil of the Caiuajara dobruskii as having a bony crescent on its head that resembled the wing of a butterfly. It would have live about 80 million years ago and developed the wingspan needed for flight in the early stages of its life.
The team of scientists published a study on the discovery in the journal PLOS One. Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist and study co-author, said there were hundreds of fossils discovered at the same site in Brazil. He said this could be most solid evidence to date suggesting such flying reptiles were social creatures.
More commonly referred to as pterodactyls, C. dobruskii was part of the pterosaur family. It gets its name from a farmer named Dobruski, who initially found a large bone bed in Southern Brazil in the 1970s. Scientists later determined it had come from the Cretaceous Period, but the site was not previously known to have any dinosaur bones.
"Several features of the Caiuajara dobruskii head differ from all other members of this clade, including the presence of a bony expansion projecting inside the large opening in the skull in front of the eyes, and the rounded depressions in the outer surface of the jaw," PLOS wrote in a press release. "Younger and older reptiles mainly varied in the size and angle of the bony crest on the top of the head. The crest appeared to change from small and inclined in juveniles, to large and steep in adults.
"According to the authors, the bone analysis suggests this species was gregarious, lived in colonies and may have been able to fly at a very young age."
The scientists determined that the bones of hundreds of these flying reptiles were buried at the site, but could only identify 47 individuals. The younger ones had wingspans of about 2.1 meters and the adults' were more than seven meters in length.