{"id":12721,"date":"2025-07-25T09:29:57","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin-new\/?post_type=campus_story&p=12721"},"modified":"2025-07-25T09:29:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:29:57","slug":"uwos-dino-doc-among-team-to-discover-new-human-height-pterosaur","status":"publish","type":"campus_story","link":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/story\/uwos-dino-doc-among-team-to-discover-new-human-height-pterosaur\/","title":{"rendered":"UWO\u2019s dino doc among team to discover new human-height pterosaur"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
This rendering is a speculative life restoration of the Infernodrakon hastocollis dinosaur as it is foraging. (Illustration by Jun-Hyeok Jang as it appeared in a recent edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As prehistoric creature names go, \u201cInfernodrakon\u201d (i.e., \u201cdragon from hell\u201d) is\u2014if you\u2019ll pardon the pun\u2014fire.<\/p>\n

Credit a University of Wisconsin\u2014Oshkosh professor as part of the team of paleontologists to discover this new species of pterosaur, the winged reptiles that coexisted with Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaur species about 67 million years ago.<\/p>\n

The new-to-us creature\u2019s scientific name is\u00a0Infernodrakon hostacollis<\/em>. It is technically a cousin of the dinosaurs. And UWO Geology Professor Joe Peterson was among its discoverers.<\/p>\n

Peterson said 23 years ago he was part of a team that found a telltale bone from the animal\u2019s lanky neck. The group figured it belonged to a known pterosaur.<\/p>\n

More than 20 years later, a deeper analysis of that single bone was key to its identification and confirmation as a new pterosaur genus and species.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe first found this bone around 2002,\u201d said Peterson, adding that the fossil turned up during the excavation of the site of a juvenile T. rex in Hell Creek, Montana, when he was an undergraduate student. \u201cWe knew it was a pterosaur at that time, but we didn\u2019t know which one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pterosaurs ranged from \u201cthe size of a small aircraft to the size of sparrow,\u201d Peterson said. Infernodrakon\u2019s wingspan clocked in at approximately 16-feet-wide and, when landed on the ground, would have stood as tall as a human.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This rendering of a juvenile pterosaur dinosaur, center, shows it\u2019s human-sized height while standing and a wingspan of approximately 16-feet wide. (Artwork as published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cPterosaurs evolved before birds did,\u201d he said. \u201cThese were the first vertebrate animals to achieve flight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peterson said when the Infernodrakon fossil was first collected in the early 2000s, examination clearly suggested it was a relative of\u00a0Quetzalcoatlus<\/em>, the largest of the pterosaurs. But not until roughly four years ago, when a graduate student from Berkeley reexamined the creature\u2019s neck bone, did the true discovery come into focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, we looked at it again, compared it to the new literature on the species and realized this is something totally different than we\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Artist renderings of the somewhat-pelican-like Infernodrakon included in the research team\u2019s study\u00a0published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology<\/a>\u00a0include a juvenile T. rex in the background, an homage to the original star dinosaur of the dig site where the bone was found.<\/p>\n

Peterson said the fact that the Infernodrakon bone, originally considered an unremarkable fossil, is now key to the new discovery says much about the never-settled process of science.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat first (juvenile T. rex) paper we published on the specimen in 2005 was the first paper I ever published,\u201d Peterson said. \u201cNow, it\u2019s many years later, and we\u2019re admitting we were wrong. That\u2019s how science evolves\u2026 This is not just about pterosaurs but how science works. We\u2019re always correcting ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he\u2019s not teaching and mentoring researchers at UWO, Peterson\u2019s scholarship \u201cfocuses on trying to understand how things become fossilized and what these animals went through.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has also earned notice for some of his\u00a0previous research including a fascinating study into juvenile Tyrannosaur bite-force<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This fall, he teaches UWO courses on dinosaurs in the age of reptiles and\u00a0 upper-level paleontology.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he and the Infernodrakon research team await peer feedback about their findings on another creature of late-Cretaceous, a period of Earth\u2019s history when Alaska harbored palm trees and crocodiles and there was likely no permanent ice on the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real peer review comes now when other researchers play with this idea,\u201d he said. \u201cOne thing it\u2019s doing is making us think more about the diversity of organisms at that time\u2026 Here we are looking not just at birds and snakes and lizards and fish but these giant flying reptiles. It\u2019s helping bring that picture of that ecosystem into focus, and we\u2019re getting more and more interesting organisms alive at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Written by Alex Hummel<\/p>\n

Link to original story: https:\/\/www.uwosh.edu\/today\/127489\/uwos-dino-doc-among-team-to-discover-new-human-height-pterosaur\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As prehistoric creature names go, \u201cInfernodrakon\u201d (i.e., \u201cdragon from hell\u201d) is\u2014if you\u2019ll pardon the pun\u2014fire. Credit a University of Wisconsin\u2014Oshkosh professor as part of the team of paleontologists to discover this new species of pterosaur, the winged reptiles that coexisted with Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaur species about 67 million years ago. The new-to-us creature\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":12725,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","institution":[94],"story_category":[],"class_list":["post-12721","campus_story","type-campus_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","institution-uw-oshkosh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story\/12721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/campus_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"institution","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/institution?post=12721"},{"taxonomy":"story_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/story_category?post=12721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}