A University of Cape Town scientist is part of an international team playing detective in the case of one of the most bizarre-looking creatures ever known, with 1 000 narrow teeth giving it a mouth like a hairbrush.
The prehistoric Pterodaustro would probably have used its teeth to scoop microscopic organisms out of the water as the modern flamingo does, said dinosaur-bone specialist Anusuya Chinsamy of UCT's Zoology Department.
On Friday, Chinsamy and two colleagues published the first detailed fossil examination of the creature in the Royal Society's prestigious Biology Letters, online journal.
The reptile was a cousin of the dinosaur, descending from a common relative, said Chinsamy.
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It had a wingspan the size of a surfboard and would have frequently flown over herds of dinosaurs.
It lived 140 million years ago in what is now Argentina and belonged to the pterosaur group, the first group of vertebrates to evolve the ability to fly.
Its bones were lighter than those of any creature, even birds that we know today.
"Pterodaustro is a very unusual flying filter-feeder," said co-author of the paper Laura Codornia.
"Now for the first time, we understand it as a living animal, its lifespan and whether it was more like a reptile or a bird.
"We know that it grew more slowly than a bird but stopped growing at a certain size, unlike most reptiles, which just keep on getting bigger and bigger."
The third co-author of the paper, Luis Chiappe, of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, said this finding was interesting "because until now most people thought these flying reptiles would be more like modern birds, which grow very quickly and become mature in a matter of weeks".
The team was lucky because they had hundreds of examples of Pterodaustro to examine, he said.
o Chinsamy will be a speaker in April at SciFest Africa, South Africa's national science festival, where she will launch her book Famous Dinosaurs of Africa.
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This article was originally published on page 4 of The Mercury on March 03, 2008
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