Jeremy Clarkson Wouldn't Be Amused By This At All

People who know me will attest to the fact that I like a good dinosaur story, more, perhaps, than is entirely healthy. Fortunately, there's been a particularly good crop of them this year. With all of the fossils laying around in museums just waiting to be examined, described, and announced, I think that I can safely rely on there being new dinosaur entertainment aplenty in the coming years.

The most recent example is that of a new species of pterosaur which had been discovered in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil. Named by the paleontologist who first described it, Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth (Hampshire, UK), the new species, lacusovagus ("lake wanderer"), is a member of the Chaoyangopteridae group of toothless pterosaurs. Excitingly, not only is it the sole member of the Chaoyangopteridae found outside of China, but it is also much, much larger. To quote the article:

"Mark Witton identified the creature from a partial skull fossil from which he was able to estimate that it would have had a five-metre wingspan - bigger than a family car [emphasis added] - and would stand over one metre tall at the shoulder.

He said: “Some of the previous examples we have from this family in China are just 60 centimetres long - as big as the skull of the new species. Put simply, it dwarfs any chaoyangopterid we’ve seen before by miles.”

-- University of Portsmouth website

In short, that's quite a pair of wings to stretch out over your Audi. It occurs to me to wonder how the Stig might handle such a creature lurking around the track, but that's a train of thought that leads nowhere productive, more into "which one would win in a fight, a sabre-toothed cat or a pterosaur?" territory (yes, before you get cross, I know that they weren't contemporaries). Read the full story on the University of Portsmouth website, or the shorter summary on the BBC News site.