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Prehistoric sharks feasted on flying reptiles, fossil reveals
The wing bone of a Pteranodon that cruised the skies 83 million years ago shows that the creature met its end in the mouth of a marine predator.
A series of bite marks on a pterosaur’s wing bone reveals that it likely ended up the meal of several large predatory fish, including a prehistoric shark called Squalicorax.
The 83-million-year-old fossil, found in 2014 at a paleontological site in Alabama, adds to growing evidence that these weird wonders on wings were sometimes snacks for dinosaurs, prehistoric crocodile relatives, and large fish. After all, pterosaurs were not just bags of bones and leathery skin, as people might assume.
“Pterosaurs actually had a lot of meat on their skeletons,” says Michael Habib, a pterosaur expert at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the latest find. “They were not the skinny animals often depicted in films