First fossil embryo of flying reptile

[Garrison Hilliard <garrison@efn.org>]

First fossil embryo of flying reptile
Thursday, June 10, 2004 Posted: 10:03 AM EDT (1403 GMT) 


LONDON (Reuters) -- Scientists in China have discovered a 121 million-year-old
fossil containing an embryo of a flying reptile that lived alongside the
dinosaurs.

It is the only known fossil of an embryo of a pterosaur, a winged lizard that
evolved powered flight.

"Dinosaur embryos have been discovered all over the world, but so far no
pterosaur embryos have been reported," Xiaolin Wang and Zhonghe Zhou, of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said in a report in the science journal
Nature on Wednesday.

The embryo is preserved in an almost complete egg and was found in the sediment
of a lake in Liaoning in northeastern China that is known for its fossil riches.

Parts of its skull and skeleton are preserved and the lower jaw shows two
slender and slightly curved teeth, according to the scientists.

It is bigger than fossils of hatched pterosaurs, which suggests it probably
would have hatched soon.

"The Liaoning embryo has a wingspan of 27 cm (10.6 inches), indicating that the
embryo would have grown up into a medium-to-large pterosaur," the scientists
added.

The earliest pterosaurs, the first known flying vertebrates, lived about 230
million years ago. They died out about 65 million years ago.


http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/06/10/science.embryo.reut/index.html