A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Paleontologist Brian Pickles was wrapping up a field course in Alberta, Canada, when he came across a curious little fossil in Dinosaur Provincial Park.
BRIAN PICKLES: When we brought it back to do an identification of all the last few bones, couldn't really work out what it was.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR science correspondent Jonathan Lambert picks up the story.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: Upon finding this fossil, Pickles, of the University of Reading, sent it to a colleague who identified that it was the neck vertebra of a pterosaur. Pterosaurs were the largest flying creatures to have ever lived, with some species having wingspans as wide as fighter jets. This specific species was Cryodrakon boreas, which was one of the largest pterosaurs that soared the skies of the late cretaceous, about 76 million years ago.
PICKELS: If you imagine when it's standing up it's maybe as tall as a giraffe. When its got its wings stretched out, talking about an adult here, you could be looking at a 10-meter wingspan.
LAMBERT: The lives of pterosaurs are still pretty mysterious. Despite their gargantuan size, their bones are actually quite delicate, and so fossils are rare. This find turned out to be a juvenile, and upon a closer look, Pickles noticed a cone-shaped bite mark. He wondered whether that bite mark might be a clue as to what killed this creature.
PICKELS: Anytime you find evidence of interactions between animals in deep time, it starts to help you build a picture of what's going on.
LAMBERT: Dinosaur Provincial Park is chock-full of teeth from all sorts of ancient critters. And by comparing those teeth to the bite mark, Pickles and his colleagues pinpointed the likely biter as a crocodilian species that lived in this ancient riverbed.
PICKELS: You could picture, you know, a pterosaur walking up to the water, taking a drink, and maybe it's been attacked by this crocodilian that was in the river. Or alternatively, the animal has died. It's kind of washed out into the river, and then you've got this crocodilian that's preying on it.
LAMBERT: Pickles published the research in the journal Paleontology, and he can't say for sure that that's exactly what happened. While much about the time of the dinosaurs remains a mystery, this study shows how even the tiniest fossil can be a window into the drama that played out tens of millions of years ago.
Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
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