What An Amazing Find,

and in such unusual circumstances,

researcher Victor Beccari worked up this 3D model of the tapejarid. "Although we don't know what colour the crest could be, a safe bet would be something in between red and brown," Beccari says, the find is amazing as the remains belong to a tapejarid, a toothless pterosaur from the early Cretaceous period known for its huge cranial crest composed partly of bone and partly of soft tissue, skulls and partial skeletons of Brazilian tapejarids have turned up before, but this fossil was found with more than 90% of its skeleton intact, along with some soft tissue in place around the bones, "This fossil is special because it is the most complete pterosaur from Brazil and it brings new information about the anatomy and ecology of this animal," says Victor Beccari, co-author of a study on the find published last Wednesday in the open-access journal PLOS One, the reptile originally comes from the Crato Formation in the Araripe basin, a fossil-rich area in north-eastern Brazil that dates back to a time in the Cretaceous period around 115 million years ago. The remains were found preserved in six perfectly complementary yellowish limestone slabs that fit together by rectilinear cuts to present a nearly complete picture of the creature. It had a wingspan of more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) and stood 3.2 feet (1 meter) tall, with its head crest accounting for an astounding 40% of its height, but how was it found? Brazilian federal police found the tapejarid remains while investigating an illegal fossil trade operation in 2013. They recovered 3,000 specimens kept in storage units in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro and transferred them to the Geosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo for study. Since 1942, Brazilian law has categorized fossils as state property, as they're considered part of the country's geological heritage and forbidden from being sold commercially, so now hopefully the specimen will be available for researchers to study and not locked away in a private collection, no news of any arrest as of yet.