Scientists Unearth The Ancient Bones of The Largest Jurassic Pterosaur Ever Found

During low tide on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, a graduate student hunting for dinosaur bones looked down at the coastal rocks and made the discovery of a lifetime: the remains of the largest pterosaur on record from the Jurassic period. Since collecting the specimen in 2017 – an eventful excavation that involved cutting out the pterosaur chunks with diamond-tipped saws and almost losing the fossil when the tide returned – researchers have studied its anatomy and determined that it’s a previously unknown species. They gave the beast the Scottish Gaelic name Dearc sgiathanach (jark ski-an-ach), a double meaning of “winged reptile“ and “reptile from Skye,“ as Skye’s Gaelic name (An t-Eilean Sgitheanach) means “the winged isle“. D. sgiathanach would have sported a wingspan of more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) long, a wild size for a pterosaur dating to the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago), the team said. “Dearc is the biggest pterosaur we know from the Jurassic period, and that tells us that