Gliding winged reptiles called kuehneosaurs lived in what is now the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England, during the Triassic period, some 210 million years ago.
Kuehneosaurus latus (right) and Kuehneosuchus latissimus (left). Image credit: Nobu Tamura, http://spinops.blogspot.com.
Kuehneosaurs looked like lizards, but were more closely related to the ancestors of crocodilians and dinosaurs.
They were small animals, which could fit neatly on the palm of a hand.
There were two species: Kuehneosaurus latus and Kuehneosuchus latissimus.
One had extensive wings, the other had shorter wings, made from a layer of skin stretched over their elongated side ribs, which allowed them to swoop from tree to tree.
Like the modern flying lizard Draco from southeast Asia, they most likely wandered about on the ground and climbed trees in search of insect prey.
When startled, or if they spotted a tasty insect flying by, they could launch themselves into the air, and land safely 10 m away.
The discovery was made by University of Bristol student Mike Cawthorne and his colleagues.
The authors examined numerous reptile fossils from three limestone quarries, Emborough, Batscombe and Highcroft quarries, which formed the biggest sub-tropical island at the time, called the Mendip Palaeoisland.
In addition to Kuehneosaurus latus and Kuehneosuchus latissimus, they recorded the presence of reptiles with complex teeth, the trilophosaur Variodens and the aquatic Pachystropheus that probably lived a bit like a modern-day otter likely eating shrimps and small fish.
These creatures either fell or their bones were washed into caves and cracks in the limestone.
“All the beasts were small. I had hoped to find some dinosaur bones, or even their isolated teeth, but in fact I found everything else but dinosaurs,” Cawthorne said.
“The collections I studied had been made in the 1940s and 1950s when the quarries were still active, and paleontologists were able to visit and see fresh rock faces and speak to the quarrymen.”
“It took a lot of work identifying the fossil bones, most of which were separate and not in a skeleton,” said University of Bristol’s Professor Mike Benton.
“However, we have a lot of comparative material, and Mike Cawthorne was able to compare the isolated jaws and other bones with more complete specimens from the other sites around Bristol.”
“He has shown that the Mendip Palaeoisland, which extended from Frome in the east to Weston-super-Mare in the west, nearly 30 km long, was home to diverse small reptiles feeding on the plants and insects.”
“He didn’t find any dinosaur bones, but it’s likely that they were there because we have found dinosaur bones in other locations of the same geological age around Bristol.”
The area around Bristol 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic was an archipelago of small islands set in a warm sub-tropical sea.
“The bones were collected by some great fossil finders in the 1940s and 1950s including Tom Fry, an amateur collector working for Bristol University and who generally cycled to the quarries and returned laden with heavy bags of rocks,” said University of Bristol’s Dr. David Whiteside.
“The other collectors were the gifted researchers Walter Kühne, a German who was imprisoned in Great Britain in the 2nd World War, and Pamela L. Robinson from University College London.”
“They gave their specimens to the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological collections of the University of Bristol.”
The team’s paper was publsihed in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.
_____
Michael Cawthorne et al. Latest Triassic terrestrial microvertebrate assemblages from caves on the Mendip palaeoisland, S.W. England, at Emborough, Batscombe and Highcroft Quarries. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, published online January 20, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2023.12.003