- LONDON (Reuters) -- Scientists
in China have discovered a 121 million-year-old fossil containing an embryo
of a flying reptile that lived alongside the dinosaurs.
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- It is the only known fossil of an embryo of a pterosaur,
a winged lizard that evolved powered flight.
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- "Dinosaur embryos have been discovered all over
the world, but so far no pterosaur embryos have been reported," Xiaolin
Wang and Zhonghe Zhou, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said
in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.
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- The embryo is preserved in an almost complete egg and
was found in the sediment of a lake in Liaoning in northeastern China that
is known for its fossil riches.
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- Parts of its skull and skeleton are preserved and the
lower jaw shows two slender and slightly curved teeth, according to the
scientists.
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- It is bigger than fossils of hatched pterosaurs, which
suggests it probably would have hatched soon.
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- "The Liaoning embryo has a wingspan of 10.6 inches,
indicating that the embryo would have grown up into a medium-to-large pterosaur,"
the scientists added.
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- The earliest pterosaurs, the first known flying vertebrates,
lived about 230 million years ago. They died out about 65 million years
ago.
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