“Wonderful” creature with the strangest head ever caught during the “Munich” operation

A group of thieves tried to smuggle thousands of ancient fossilized stone pieces, clay and limestone tablets, which were extracted from the famous “Ararib” basin in Brazil, in 2013, and placed in barrels, but these rocks hid a priceless treasure among their stones.

The smugglers took out fossils and rocks containing the remains of animals and preserved creatures and impeccable fingerprints of creatures that lived millions of years ago on this land.
The police managed at the last minute to raid the place of the hidden barrels, which opened a major investigation called the “Munich investigation” with a campaign aimed at combating illegal export and sending nearly 3,000 of the seized samples to the University of São Paulo for preservation and study.

The stones hid a very strange and mysterious creature

According to the report published in the “nationalgeographic” magazine specialized in the zoological world, among those traces was found an eccentric creature never seen before, about four feet high, with a jaw similar to a bird’s beak and a headdress larger than its entire body.

Today, after years of study, scientists reported that this creature with a very large head is only a new type of creature that lived millions of ages, and confirmed that it is the first almost complete skeleton of a type of pterosaur called “Tupandactylus navigans”, which lived during the early Cretaceous period. , about 110 million years ago from now.
It’s like winning a very big prize for an important reason

Paleontologist at the Federal University (ABC) in São Paulo, Brazil, Dr. Fabiana Rodríguez Costa, author of a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE, considers finding this discovery “a bit like winning the lottery.”

The important youth that makes this discovery “big”, despite the description of this creature in 2003 by scientists from Germany and Britain using two skulls found, but this discovery is gaining its importance because it is the first time that paleontologists have been able to study the rest of the body of this animal Oddly enough, including some soft tissues and bones in the neck, wing and leg.
A discovery that may solve a very strange mystery in this mysterious creature

The magazine noted in its report that this discovery would solve a strange mystery about this creature that has baffled scientists since its discovery, which is the shape of its strange giant head, as scientists could not know how this creature was able to fly with this mass on the head.

“You open the stone as if you were opening a book, and within those pages you will find fossils,” says paleontologist and study co-author Felipe Lima Pinheiro of the Federal University of Pampa in São Gabriel, Brazil.
A strange wind propulsion system that is millions of years old

When the unearthed specimen arrived at the University of São Paulo in 2014, the skeleton was fused and assembled into six slabs of beige limestone. Researcher Victor Beccari, a graduate student affiliated with the university and lead author of the new study, noted for the first time that a pterosaur’s head covering represented nearly three-quarters of its skull. “It’s too big for the animal’s size, like a peacock’s tail,” he says.

The crest of the skull resembles surfing sails and thus a propulsion system to aid flight. In order for the animal to be able to do that, the scientists expected that it had a short neck and bony tendons that closed with the neck vertebrae.

But after discovering the skeleton, Beccari and his colleagues were able to verify the animal’s ability to fly, and the team produced a 3-D model of the skeleton using a computerized tomography (CT) scanner to X-ray ancient bones.

As a result of the research it turned out that the bird “Tupandactylus navigans” had a long neck, long legs and relatively short wings.

The results indicate that the animal walked better on land than in flight, considering that this crest on its head is only a display of mating, or a defensive method it uses to frighten the animals.