Chilean Scientists Discover “Dragon Fossil”

Chilean Scientists Discover “Dragon Fossil”
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Who said that dragons aren’t real? Well, not exactly those dragons that we’ve all seen in fantasy movies and cartoons that spit flames from their mouths. We’re talking about ancient creatures that resemble dragons pretty well due to their appearance.

According to The New York Post, scientists from Chile uncovered the remnants of a creature that looked very much like dragons. It even had large and strong wings!

The pterosaur’s fossils were found in Chile’s Atacama Desert

The remnants of the creature in question belong to an early pterosaur species that roamed the Earth for about 160 million years. Pterosaurs are flying reptiles from the extinct order of Pterosauria. These “dragons” are a characteristic for the Mesozoic era.
More precisely, Osvaldo Rojas is responsible for the uncovering of the remnants, who is director of the Atacama Desert Museum of Natural History and Culture.
Johnathan Alarcon from the University of Chile, who led the research, declared for Reuters:

This shows the distribution of the animals in this group was wider than what was known up to now.

Alarcon also added as quoted by the same publication:

There are pterosaurs of this group also in Cuba, which apparently were coastal animals, so most likely they have migrated between the North and the South or maybe they came once and stayed, we don’t know.

Scientists had discovered “real life dragons” before. Scientists from the University of Queensland had been studying fossils of another flying “dragon” that soared above Australia long ago using its huge wings that measured 22 feet.

Pterosaurs were also the earliest vertebrates that have evolved powered flight, and they existed from the late Triassic to the Cretaceous’ end. The Cretaceous refers to the longest period from the Phanerozoic Eon, spanning roughly 79 million years.


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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