A researcher who identified a new species of flying reptile that lived 70 million years ago has put an end to a prehistoric mystery.
Part of the creature's fossilized jawbone was found five years ago inside a rock on a beach on B.C.'s Hornby Island, off the east coast of Vancouver Island in the Georgia Strait.
The fossil lay in a dusty storage cabinet at the University of Alberta's paleontology department until Ph.D. student Victoria Arbour became curious last spring and started the gruelling task of determining its origin.
"For a long time we thought it was a little dinosaur jaw and that led us down the wrong path," she said.
"We kept coming back saying, ‘What is this thing?' We thought it might be a fish, a reptile -- anything that had teeth at that time."
Arbour made a breakthrough when she compared the bone against a known Chinese species of pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived during the Cretaceous period that often grew to the size of a small airplane.
"The teeth of our fossil were small and set close together," Arbour said. "They reminded me of piranha teeth, designed for pecking away at meat."
The researcher said her pterosaur Gwawinapterus beardi would have had a very large head with a compact stocky body and a three-metre wingspan. He would be a ruthless scavenger who hunted small animals, fish and even small dinosaurs.
Her findings appear in the January issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
The new species is the first pterosaur of any kind to be found in British Columbia, and only the second ever found in Canada.
"In B.C. there's a lot of fossil collecting but a lot more things like marine shells and fish. There are very few land animals," she said.
Researchers say modern day British Columbia has little to do with where the living pterosaur was actually flying 70 million years ago.
In the late Cretaceous period, Arbour says the B.C. coastal islands were about 2,500 kilometres to the south and part of what is now California.
