We wake up in a beautiful Argentina’s Patagonia morning. We are here at the land of giants, Patagonia from the world patagon which was use by Magellan in 1950 to describe the native tribes who had at least the double normal human height. Here we hope to discover a new dragon, a new dinosaur.
We ate our breakfast and we went back to the dig site. The rock layers that hold the fossils are very hard and we must be careful not to make any damage. We dig and dig again and time goes by very fast. We don’t care about eating or resting, only dig and dig and suddenly all this effort is bearing fruit. Four little bones, all found together in an undisturbed layer and we assume that they are all from the same animal. We mark the place where we found them and we take some notes, date time. We also use our mobile phone for a first photo shoot.
That night in camp, after dinner, around a Coleman lantern, we begin to assemble the 4 bones we had found earlier. We clean them with great care. We measure and weigh them and spend a lot of time trying different arrangements of the bones hoping to identify the creature.
The next morning is cold. We can tell that winter is just around the corner and we know that this will be a difficult date at the field. The difficulties do not frighten us, we have great passion in what we do. We want to find more fossils of the mystery creature. We are here in this location the whole summer working day by day. We must find more bones so we can assemble the skeleton of the creature. Back to the dig site for more digging and the patience gives us another 5 bones.
We return to camp. The procedure is the same, cleaning, measuring, weighing. But this time we will not walk blindly through the fog of mystery. We open our computer and connect to the University Library. We are looking for similar findings in the area. Perhaps what we have found to be part of a known species. We notice some interesting similarities between some of the drawings and your unknown fossil.
The animal in the skeleton manual that most closely resembles the fossil is the pterosaur. But this one is a little bit different. We must make an announcement of the discovery of a new species of pterosaur from the Patagonia region of South America. The cranial remains were in an excellent state of preservation and belonged to a new species of pterosaur from the Early Jurassic. And the name of this new species ‘Allkauren koi’ from the native Tehuelche word ‘all’ for ‘brain’, and ‘karuen’ for ‘ancient’.
Inspired by https://peerj.com/articles/2311/
