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Also from the skull site came
yet another extremely important find - a snout from a new species of pterosaur.
Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era.
The shallow depressions along the bottom of the fossil are rows are empty
tooth sockets. It was named Coloborhynchus wadleighi in honor
of its discoverer, Chris Wadleigh. It is the first fossil of the
genus Coloborhynchus yet found in North America. |
| This
is how the site where Pawpawsaurus was discovered looks today (May
2005). When I found the dinosaur's skull 13 years ago in May of 1992,
the area was completely undeveloped and nearly devoid of vegetation.
After apartment houses were built on the site toward the end of the 90s,
grass and shrubs began to colonize it because the land was leveled, halting
the erosion that once brought fossils to the surface. |
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That's me with the skull of
Pawpawsaurus
campbelli, standing in front of the housing complex that now covers
much of the dig site. I'm very glad to have come across the skull
when I did, for if I hadn't, it may well have crumbled away completely
through weathering. It's an interesting and very special thing to
discover a new species of dinosaur and have your own name applied to it.
I consider Pawpawsaurus to be one of my greatest scientific contributions
to date. It certainly made the early 90s a very unique time period
in my life. The discovery also helped enrich the lives and research
of many other palaeontologists both local and around the world. The
odds of finding such a specimen are staggeringly low - truly, the sort
of event that only comes around once in many lifetimes. |
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