Flying monster never recorded by science appears in Japan

The Nipponopterus mifunensis monster may have been the terror of many dinosaurs.

New research by Dr. Naoki Ikegami from the Mifune Dinosaur Museum (Japan) and Dr. Rodrigo Pegas from the University of São Paulo (Brazil) has just named a completely new monster species of the Cretaceous period.

It was a pterosaur scientifically named Nipponopterus mifunensis , which lived about 90 million years ago, according to Sci-News.

Fossils of the newly excavated flying monster and a depiction of a representative of the Azhdarchidae family - Photo: Darren Naish/Cretaceous Research

Pterosaurs - flying relatives of dinosaurs - typically do not leave as many well-preserved fossils as reptiles of the same period.

'The fragile nature of pterosaur skeletons makes their fossil record particularly uneven and misleading,' the authors explain.

So with a partial femur, foot bone, metatarsal bone and caudal vertebra excavated from the Hokkaido region of Japan, the Nipponopterus mifunensis fossil is already a very valuable specimen.

Through various analytical and comparative methods , it was determined to be a previously unrecorded species, a member of the Quetzalcoatlinae , a subfamily of the pterosaur family Azhdarchidae.

The Azhdarchidae family is very special in the pterosaur lineage in general, often described with "devil" faces and super-giant bodies, many species had wingspans of up to 5-11m, much larger than any bird you can see today.

With that body size, they easily became tyrants of the skies and a danger to many dinosaurs.

According to a paper published in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research , the species shares many characteristics with another unidentified pterosaur species whose partial fossils were found in Mongolia.

Pterosaurs were the first flying vertebrates on Earth, first appearing in the Late Triassic of the Triassic period, continuously evolving, becoming more diverse and larger in the following Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Along with dinosaurs, mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs., these flying monsters are also on the list of victims of the mass extinction 66 million years ago due to the Chicxulub asteroid disaster.