'Tiny bug slayer' relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs would have fit in the palm of your hand

From Live Science.com (July 14, 2020):

Massive dinosaurs and pterosaurs have a newfound cousin: a palm-size pipsqueak of a reptile, a new fossil reveals.

Even the name of the newly described reptile — Kongonaphon kely, or "tiny bug slayer" in Malagasy and Greek — is an homage to its diminutive size, as well as its likely diet of hard-shelled insects, the researchers said.

This tiny beast reveals that the dinosaurs and pterosaurs — which reached the sizes of school buses and airplanes, respectively — originated from teensy creatures, the researchers wrote in the study.

"There's a general perception of dinosaurs as being giants," study lead researcher Christian Kammerer, a research curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, said in a statement. "But this new animal is very close to the divergence of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and it's shockingly small."

K. kely, a resident of Madagascar about 237 million years ago during the Triassic period, measured just 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall. Its anatomy may help to explain how pterosaurs achieved flight and why both dinosaurs and pterosaurs had a feather-like fuzz covering their skin, the team noted. (As a reminder, pterosaurs are reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but they are not actually dinosaurs.)

The pipsqueak's fossils were discovered in the Morondava Basin of southwestern Madagascar in 1998 by a group of researchers, led by study co-researcher John Flynn, the Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City (at the time Flynn worked at the Field Museum in Chicago). An analysis of its anatomy revealed that K. kely belongs to the scientific clade called Ornithodira, whose members are the last common ancestors of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and their descendants.

The early Ornithodira, however, are poorly known, because there are few known specimens like K. kely that date to the beginning of this lineage.

"It took some time before we could focus on these bones, but once we did, it was clear we had something unique and worth a closer look," Flynn said.

K. kely is one of the smallest non-avian ornithodirans on record. Other known early Ornithodira specimens are also small, but previously these critters were thought to be "isolated exceptions to the rule," Kammerer said. [read more]