Afghanistan - Giant flying reptile fossil has been discovered on the Scottish island

Winged reptiles are known as pterosaurs — airplane-size creatures that swooped through the skies as dinosaurs walked the Earth — were the first vertebrate animals to evolve powered flight.

A spectacular three-dimensional fossil of one previously unknown pterosaur has been discovered on the shore of the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland.

With a wingspan of more than 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), it's the biggest pterosaur ever discovered from the Jurassic period and last flapped its wings 170 million years ago. Its sharp teeth, which would have snapped up fish, still retain their shiny enamel.

In the Cretaceous period, immediately before the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, pterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus reached the size of fighter jets, with a 12-meter (40-foot) wingspan.

However, this fossil discovery confirms pterosaurs, sometimes popularly known as pterodactyls, were already very large much earlier in their evolutionary history.

“Pterosaurs preserved in such quality are exceedingly rare and are usually reserved to select rock formations in Brazil and China. And yet, an enormous superbly preserved pterosaur emerged from a tidal platform in Scotland,” said Natalia Jagielska, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. She was the lead author of a paper on the fossil that was published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

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