Oldest pterosaur found, as reported in Science (AAAS) News 13 August 2018, BBC News 14 August 2018, and Nature Ecology & Evolution 13 August 2018 doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0627-y.
Palaeontologists excavating a fossil site in Utah, USA have found remains of a pterosaur, an extinct flying reptile. The fossil site where it was found has yielded over 18,000 bones of reptiles and is considered to be the dried up remains of an oasis in an otherwise desert region.
The new fossil has been named Caelestiventus hanseni, which means “heavenly wind” and consists of a skull and some parts of the finger bones that supported the wing. The researchers estimated its wingspan was over 150cm (5ft).
The fossil site is dated as 210 million years old, which means the new pterosaur “is the only record of desert-dwelling non-pterodactyloid pterosaurs and predates all known desert pterosaurs by more than 65 Myr.” (Myr – millions of years)
Steve Brusatte, a dinosaur expert at University of Edinburgh commented in the BBC article: “It’s a trifecta: a Triassic pterosaur from a new place, preserved in an immaculate way, and found in rocks from an environment that we didn’t think they lived in so early during their evolution. What this means is that pterosaurs were already geographically widespread and thriving in a variety of environments very early in their evolution.”
Editorial Comment: With only pictures of the skull released so far, it will be interesting to see what the whole skeleton looks like as only that will enable us to evaluate if it drowned.
At present the easiest comment to make is the one that sounds so repetitive, i.e. the oldest dated pterosaur is a fully formed pterosaur, and that is no help for any evolutionary theories about pterosaurs. This only further affirms that pterosaurs were pterosaurs since they are first recorded on planet earth, and remained so until they went extinct.
Extinct creatures are just as much evidence for Genesis as “living fossils” are. The extinct ones are also reminders that the world is not evolving upwards from a few simple living things to many complex ones, but is going downhill, and has lost many of the magnificent complex creatures that God originally created to reproduce after their kind.
Evidence News vol. 18 No.12
22 August 2018
Creation Research Australia
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