The University of Alberta researcher has found a fossilized bone belonging to a flying reptile. "This is very exciting," said Victoria Arbour, a 27-year-old PhD student in the biological sciences department. "This is a new species, similar to the ones from China but it's distinct, Pterosaurs were flying animals with very big heads and long snouts. Their bodies were short. They had short hind legs and not much of a tail. "They're very weird-looking animals, look a little bit like a giraffe," Arbour said. The jawbone was found by a woman on the Gulf island three years ago. She passed it along to Graham Beard, an amateur paleontologist who runs the Vancouver Island Paleontological Museum in Qualicum Beach. Beard recognized it as an important find, but couldn't identify it himself. "I saw all these teeth and I thought it might be a dinosaur, but a pterosaur is even more exciting," Beard said Monday. While marine fossils, such as fish and petrified wood, are commonly found on Hornby Island, finding a land vertebrate is extremely rare, Beard said. He passed the fossil on to the University of Alberta, where it sat in storage until Arbour became intrigued last spring. She, too, initially thought the palm-sized rock encasing the fossilized bones and teeth might have been from a dinosaur. "I didn't know what else it could have been. We would come back to it every couple of months and say, 'What is this thing?' " Arbour said. Identifying fossilized bones can be a long process, she said. "If something is new and it's not really expected, it can take a really long time to figure out what it is." Pterosaurs are thought to have lost their teeth as they evolved. Arbour discovered that pterosaurs with teeth had roamed China long before 70 million years ago, "and they looked very, very similar." Having teeth means the pterosaur would have eaten meat — "and pretty much whatever it felt like," she said. The small teeth at the front of the jaw were well suited to scavenging meat off bones. The find has Arbour intrigued about other paleontological treasures that might be buried in this area. "We don't really find a lot of land or air animals in B.C. because we just haven't looked a lot yet — there's a lot of promise out there," Arbour said. "That's what makes me really excited about this. On Hornby Island, people find lots of [fossilized] marine creatures but not maybe bones of dinosaurs and pterosaurs. I'm hoping people might look at what they've found and we'll start to see a few more things appear." As for the name, the Gwawinapterus portion derives from a combination of "Gwa'wina" — which means "raven" in the Kwak'wala tongue of the Kwakwaka'wakw people indigenous to Hornby Island — and the Greek word "pteron," meaning "wing." The species designation "beardi" is a tribute to Beard. When researcher Victoria Arbour opened a storage cabinet at the University of Alberta, she discovered a jawbone sitting in a dark corner. The fossil had been found inside a rock on B.C.'s Hornby Island five years ago. It had then been placed in storage at the University's paleontology department, its origin a mystery. Arbour was baffled, and initially thought the jawbone may have belonged to a dinosaur. And yet the teeth, Arbour explains, "reminded me of piranha teeth, designed for pecking away at meat,". Finally, after months of investigation, Arbour identified the bone as belonging to a pterosaur. Pterosaurs are giant flying reptiles that lived until the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. Although often confused for dinosaurs, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. In fact, DiscoveryNews reports that one pterosaur may have even eaten dinosaurs. As for Arbour's pterosaur, her particular reptile has smaller teeth than others, and thus it is believed that Arbour has discovered a new genus, which she has named Gwawinapterus beardi. It is believed that this pterosaur had a wingspan of about ten feet, while other pterosaurs can have wingspans of over 30 feet. Arbour states that the pterosaur was a scavenger, and probably patrolled the skies with its wide wingspan. This is the first pterosaur ever found in B.C., although back in the Cretaceous period, the coastal islands were actually part of what is now California. Perhaps sometimes, it's not bad to have a skeleton in your closet. Or at least a jawbone.
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