Skiphosoura – the pterosaur of the gaps

So last week Dave had a new paper out and this time it’s a new pterosaur, named Skiphosoura bavarica (the sword tail of Bavaria) and it is both really interesting and really important for pterosaur research. It tells us a lot about the key transition of pterosaurs from the early forms through to the derived pterodactyloids, which has been a major subject of research for the last 15 years. Skiphosaura also shows us that the Scottish Dearc (that we covered a couple of years back) is much more important than previously thought and helps create a fantastic series of species where we can now track a whole series of evolutionary steps for pterosaurs. This transition really is now a great example of being able to see an evolutionary change over time in the fossil record. So strap in for some overly-detailed anatomical descriptions of bits of obscure pterosaurs!

Links:

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Here’s a link to the full paper – it’s open access so anyone can read it: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01377-0

And here’s Dave’s blog post about the specimen and it’s significance: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2024/11/18/skiphosoura-solving-the-transition-to-pterodactyloids/

Link to the website of the Lauer Foundation: https://www.lauerfoundationpse.org/

The bonus episode we did on Dearc: https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/tls06-bonus-jurassic-pterosaur-dearc-sgiathanach