Scientists Call Dinosaurs 'Flying Dragons' Also Exploring Southern Hemisphere Sky

Pterosaur flying dinosaur fossil illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/Tim Evanson)

JAKARTA - Scientists in Chile's Atacama Desert have discovered the fossilized remains of a 'flying dragon', a Jurassic-era dinosaur previously only known to exist in the northern hemisphere.

Dinosaur flying reptiles are associated with a group of early pterosaurs that roamed the earth 160 million years ago. It has a long pointed tail, wings and slender with teeth pointing outward.

The fossilized remains of the dinosaur were discovered by Osvaldo Rojas, director of the Atacama Desert Museum of Natural History and Culture, and later investigated by scientists at the University of Chile.

Details of the discovery, the first to link the creature to the southern hemisphere, are published in the journal 'Acta Palaeontologica Polonica'.

"This suggests the distribution of animals in this group is wider than was known until now," said Jhonatan Alarcon, the University of Chile scientist who led the investigation.

The discovery of this fossil demonstrates the close relationship and possible migration between the northern and southern hemispheres, at a time when most of the world's southern landmass was believed to be connected on the supercontinent called Gondwana.

"There were pterosaurs from this group also in Cuba, which appeared to be coastal animals. So it's very likely they had migrated between the North and the South or maybe they came once and lived, we don't know," Alarcon said.

Chile's vast Atacama Desert, once largely submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean, now features a landscape like a desert on the moon, with sand and rock.

The region, some of which has not seen rain for decades, is a hot spot for fossil discoveries, with much untouched in remote areas not far below the desert surface.