This pocket-sized shaggy reptile hopped around a pre-dino world
Kongonaphon kely, a newly discovered ancient reptile species, belonged to a group called Ornithodira, which also includes dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and their descendants. (Illustration by Alex Boersma/)About 237 million years ago, a tiny, bug-eating reptile hopped along the sandy riverbanks of present-day Madagascar. Standing about 4 inches tall at the hip, this little creature lived just a few million years before the advent of dinosaurs and pterosaurs—the largest animals ever to walk the land or take to the skies. Its petite stature suggests that dinosaurs and pterosaurs may also have had very humble beginnings.“Their early history is very mysterious because there are very few fossils,” says Christian Kammerer, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, who reported the ancient reptile’s discovery on July 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Looking at body size evolution in the group, we find good evidence that the...