Archaeologists Find Fossil Of 'Fearsome Dragon' In Australia

Australia’s largest flying reptile has been uncovered, a pterosaur with an estimated seven-meter wingspan that soared like a dragon above the ancient, vast inland sea once covering much of outback Queensland, archaeologists disclosed last week to HeritageDaily.

Photo Insert: Thapunngaka shawi is Australia's largest known pterosaur. The large bony crest found on its lower jaw is the third-largest in the world.

University of Queensland (UQ) doctoral candidate Tim Richards, from the Dinosaur Lab in UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, led a research team that analyzed a fossil of the creature’s jaw, discovered on Wanamara Country, near Richmond in North West Queensland.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a real-life dragon,” Richards said. “The new pterosaur, which we named Thapunngaka shawi, would have been a fearsome beast, with a spear-like mouth and a wingspan around seven meters.

“It was essentially just a skull with a long neck, bolted on a pair of long wings. This thing would have been quite savage. It would have cast a great shadow over some quivering little dinosaur that wouldn’t have heard it until it was too late,” he theorized.

Richards said the skull alone would have been just over one meter long, containing around 40 teeth, perfectly suited to grasping the many fish known to inhabit Queensland’s no-longer-existent Eromanga Sea.

The new species belonged to a group of pterosaurs known as anhanguerians, which inhabited every continent during the latter part of the Age of Dinosaurs. Being perfectly adapted to powered flight, pterosaurs had thin-walled and relatively hollow bones. Given these adaptations, their fossilized remains are rare and often poorly preserved. “It’s quite amazing fossils of these animals exist at all,” Richards said.

Dr. Steve Salisbury, the co-author of the paper and Richard’s supervisor, said what was striking about this new species of anhanguerian was the massive size of the bony crest on its lower jaw, which it presumably had on the upper jaw as well.

The name of the new species honors the First Nations peoples of the Richmond area where the fossil was found, incorporating words from the now-extinct language of the Wanamara Nation.

“The genus name, Thapunngaka, incorporates thapun [ta-boon] and ngaka [nga-ga], the Wanamara words for ‘spear’ and ‘mouth’, respectively,” Salisbury said.

“These crests probably played a role in the flight dynamics of these creatures, and hopefully future research will deliver more definitive answers,” he added. The fossil was found in a quarry just northwest of Richmond in June 2011 by Len Shaw, a local fossicker who has been ‘scratching around’ in the area for decades.

“The species name, shawi, honors the fossil’s discoverer Len Shaw, so the name means ‘Shaw’s spear mouth’.”

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