A study released on Wednesday claims that pterosaurs, the world’s earliest flying reptiles, were once able to fly across Australia 107 million years ago.
After scrutinising two fragments of ancient bone taken more than three decades ago at Dinosaur Cove, a fossil-bearing site in the Australian state of Victoria, palaeontologists came to that conclusion.
According to a study published on Wednesday in the scientific journal History Biology, the samples turned out to be the oldest pterosaur remains ever discovered in the nation.
The giant creature was the first vertebrate to evolve the ability of flight and lived alongside dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era which started 252 million years ago.
Experts from the Perth-based Curtin University and Museums Victoria, in Melbourne, examined bones from two individuals, including a wing bone belonging to the first juvenile pterosaur ever reported in Australia.
A piece of pelvis bone was found to have come from a pterosaur with a wingspan exceeding two meters (6.5 ft). Some pterosaurs had wingspans of more than 10 meters (33 ft).
The Australian specimens were discovered during an excavation at Dinosaur Cove in the 1980s, led by palaeontologists Tom Rich and Pat Vickers-Rich, from Museums Victoria Research Institute.
The lead author of the study published Wednesday, Adele Pentland from Curtin University, told CNN that the discovery showed the massive creatures flew over Australia tens of millions of years ago, despite harsh conditions during the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago), when Victoria was in darkness for weeks on end.
“Australia was further south than it is today,” she said, adding the location where the two specimens were recovered would have been in the polar circle at the time.
Fewer than 25 sets of pterosaur remains belonging to four species have been found in Australia since the 1980s, she said. By comparison, in places like Brazil and Argentina more than 100 sets have been retrieved at individual sites, she added.
Pentland, a PhD student, attributed the three decades it took to confirm the present specimens to the lack of enthusiasm about the species in the country, until she got hold of them and “finally gave them the moment in the sun.”
In a statement, Rich, from Museums Victoria Research Institute, said it was “wonderful” to see the excavation work done at Dinosaur Cove in the 1980s pay off.
At the time, volunteers spent years digging a 60-meter tunnel in a seaside cliff where the bones were found.
“These two fossils were the outcome of a labor-intensive effort by more than 100 volunteers over a decade,” he added.