Australian pterosaur had a huge tongue to help gulp down prey

A 100-million-year-old fossil pterosaur found in Australia may have had the largest and most muscular tongue of all its relatives.

The fossil was found in 2021 by Kevin Petersen, the curator at Kronosaurus Korner, a museum near the outback town of Richmond in Queensland.

Normally with pterosaurs – flying reptiles that inhabited Earth at the same time as dinosaurs – you might find one bone, says Petersen. “But as I started to dig around, more and more bone started to show and I realised I needed to go very carefully,” he says.

Nearly a quarter of the skeleton has now been recovered, making it the most complete pterosaur ever found by scientists in Australia.

The entire lower jaw was preserved, along with part of the upper jaw, vertebrae, ribs, and leg and feet bones. But most surprising was the preservation of the extremely delicate throat bones, just a few millimetres in diameter, which reminded Petersen of spaghetti.

A team led by Adele Pentland at Curtin University in Perth realised the fossil belonged to an entirely new genus and species in the Anhangueria family of pterosaurs, which are found globally. The creature is estimated to have had a wingspan of 4.6 metres. In honour of Petersen, it has been named Haliskia peterseni.

Although unrelated to birds, it would have looked a bit like a giant pelican, says Petersen. But Pentland says it would have been a “demon pelican” because it had a mouth full of spiky teeth.

What sets H. peterseni apart from any other known pterosaur is that its throat bones are much larger, indicating that it had a massive, muscular tongue, says Pentland.

The team thinks the tongue was used to catch and hold prey, probably slippery animals such as squid and fish. Once prey was grabbed by its jaws, H. peterseni’s teeth would have closed like a zipper or cage, preventing escape, says Pentland.

Like a pelican, it probably swallowed its prey whole, she says. The tongue was also probably used to push the meal down into its throat.

During the Cretaceous Period, when H. peterseni lived, what is now inland Queensland was covered by ocean, which was the pterosaur’s hunting ground.

“It was really breathtaking to see the remains of this fossil animal and to imagine the abundance of life that must have been there at that time and how very different it would have been to what we see in outback Queensland today,” says Pentland.