A 100-million-year-old fossil pterosaur present in Australia could have had the biggest and most muscular tongue of all its kin.

The fossil was present in 2021 by Kevin Petersen, the curator at Kronosaurus Korner, a museum close to the outback city of Richmond in Queensland.

Usually with pterosaurs – flying reptiles that inhabited Earth similtaneously dinosaurs – you would possibly discover one bone, says Petersen. “However as I began to dig round, an increasing number of bone began to point out and I realised I wanted to go very fastidiously,” he says.

Practically 1 / 4 of the skeleton has now been recovered, making it essentially the most full pterosaur ever discovered by scientists in Australia.

All the decrease jaw was preserved, together with a part of the higher jaw, vertebrae, ribs, and leg and ft bones. However most shocking was the preservation of the extraordinarily delicate throat bones, only a few millimetres in diameter, which reminded Petersen of spaghetti.

A group led by Adele Pentland at Curtin College in Perth realised the fossil belonged to a wholly new genus and species within the Anhangueria household of pterosaurs, that are discovered globally. The creature is estimated to have had a wingspan of 4.6 metres. In honour of Petersen, it has been named Haliskia peterseni.

Though unrelated to birds, it might have seemed a bit like an enormous pelican, says Petersen. However Pentland says it might have been a “demon pelican” as a result of it had a mouth filled with spiky enamel.

What units H. peterseni other than another identified pterosaur is that its throat bones are a lot bigger, indicating that it had an enormous, muscular tongue, says Pentland.

The group thinks the tongue was used to catch and maintain prey, most likely slippery animals corresponding to squid and fish. As soon as prey was grabbed by its jaws, H. peterseni’s enamel would have closed like a zipper or cage, stopping escape, says Pentland.

Like a pelican, it most likely swallowed its prey entire, she says. The tongue was additionally most likely used to push the meal down into its throat.

Through the Cretaceous Interval, when H. peterseni lived, what’s now inland Queensland was coated by ocean, which was the pterosaur’s searching floor.

“It was actually breathtaking to see the stays of this fossil animal and to think about the abundance of life that should have been there at the moment and the way very completely different it might have been to what we see in outback Queensland immediately,” says Pentland.