Fossilized remains of a terrifying flying dinosaur have been found in central Argentina.
The beast was over 30 feet wide, about the size of a school bus.
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A paleontologist carefully digs up the ancient dinosaur bones
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A computer representation of a large pterosaurCredit: Getty Images – Getty
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Pterosaurs were scavengers that ate meat and fishCredit: Getty Images – Getty
Researchers recovered about 40 bones and body fragments from the giant winged dinosaur.
Leonardo Ortiz, the study’s leader, gave the creature an appropriate name: “It’s the dragon of death,” Ortiz said.
Like today’s birds, the dragon of death had hollow bones, but the beast looked more like a reptile because it was cold-blooded.
DailyMail quoted Ortiz as saying, “We don’t have a current record of any close relatives who even have a body modification similar to these beasts.”
Pterosaurs, dinosaurs of the same family as the dragon of death, were one of the first creatures after insects to develop motorized flight.
It is clear that the sediments where the newly discovered bones settled were about 86 million years old.
Dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago when a seven-and-a-half-mile-wide meteor struck the Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula.
This means that the dragon of death was patrolling the sky about 20 million years before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
The traits of the death dragon are so unique that it required Ortiz and his team to give the beast a new scientific name.
“Basically, these features are found in the vertebrae and limbs. This allowed us to establish a new species of pterosaur,” Ortiz told USA Today.
They settled in Thanatosdrakon amaru, which combines the Greek words for “death” and “dragon.”
The first dinosaur fossils were discovered and recognized as prehistoric beasts just 200 years ago in Sussex, England.
Centuries earlier, an English chemistry professor found a dinosaur femur bone, thought to belong to a giant human.
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