Student Discovers Ancient Flying Reptile That Lived 200 Million Years Ago

A college student has discovered a prehistoric flying reptile that lived around 200 million years ago in what is now the United Kingdom.

Mike Cawthorne, a masters student at the University of Bristol in southwest England, identified the gliding, winged creature while studying numerous reptile fossils from limestone quarries in the region.

The region around where the city of Bristol lies today would have looked very different around 200 million years ago at the boundary of the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods. At the time, the area was home to an archipelago of small islands set in a warm, sub-tropical sea.

What was the largest of these now-vanished islands is referred to as the Mendip palaeo-Island. The limestone quarries where the flying reptiles came from—known as Emborough, Highcroft and Combe—once formed part of Mendip. The quarry sites are rich in fossils, but their collections have not been described in detail before.

For a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Cawthorne investigated fossils from these sites that were collected in the mid-20th century.

"The collections I studied had been made in the 1940s and 1950s when the quarries were still active, and paleontologists were able to visit and see fresh rock faces and speak to the quarrymen," Cawthorne said in a press release.

The study of the fossils revealed evidence of an array of unusual animals, shedding new light on these prehistoric ecosystems.

"Mike Cawthorne's Masters project was to understand the whole assemblage of beasts living on the so-called Mendip Island," Mike Benton, an author on the study from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, told Newsweek. "At the time, over 200 million years ago, the U.K. was near the equator, and much of England was flooded, leaving limestone islands peeping through the warm seas—something like Florida today.

"The fossils are isolated bones and partial skeletons preserved in ancient soils that got washed into fissures and caves in the limestone. The individual bones are generally very well preserved, almost as good as modern bones, but they are all quite small, and so he had to work a lot with a microscope to get the detail."

Among the animals that Cawthorne identified were ancient crocodile ancestors, the lizard-like reptile variodens, the aquatic reptile pachystropheus that may have lived similarly to modern-day otters—likely eating shrimp and small fish—and a rare early mammal.

"I had hoped to find some dinosaur bones, or even their isolated teeth, but in fact I found everything else but dinosaurs," Cawthorne said.

In addition, Cawthorne identified prehistoric flying reptiles from a group known as the kuehneosaurs. These ancient creatures were small animals that looked like lizards with wings made from a layer of skin stretching over their elongated side ribs. These wings would have enabled the creatures to swoop from tree to tree.

Like the modern flying lizard draco, kuehneosaurs most likely wandered about on the ground and sometimes climbed trees in search of insect prey. If they were startled or spotted an insect flying by, they could launch themselves into the air and land safely several feet away.

"It took a lot of work identifying the fossil bones, most of which were separate and not in a skeleton," Benton said in the press release. "However, we have a lot of comparative material, and Mike Cawthorne was able to compare the isolated jaws and other bones with more complete specimens from the other sites around Bristol.

"He has shown that the Mendip Palaeo-island[...]was home to diverse small reptiles feeding on the plants and insects. He didn't find any dinosaur bones, but it's likely that they were there because we have found dinosaur bones in other locations of the same geological age around Bristol."

The importance of the latest study is that it has revealed the rare, small beasts that lived at the feet of the dinosaurs, according to Benton.

"Normally, such tiny animals are not well preserved, or not preserved at all. In other locations, we find dinosaur skeletons of the same age, preserved in ancient river deposits, but the little beasts just get crushed or washed away," Benton said.

"So, this was a time when modern ecosystems were shaping up, including mammals and lizards, like today, but we know so little about these beasts. Kuehneosaurids are an entirely extinct group, with no later survivors, but they show us some of the richness of the ecology and that there were predatory reptiles that fed on insects and did so by gliding."

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Update 1/31/24, 9:24 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional comments from Mike Benton.