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Life restoration showing Phosphatodraco in terrestrial pose

Phosphatodraco is a genus of azhdarchid pterosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous in what is now Morocco. In 2000, a pterosaur specimen consisting of five neck vertebrae was discovered in the Ouled Abdoun phosphatic basin. The specimen was made the holotype of the new genus and species Phosphatodraco mauritanicus in 2003. It is one of the last known pterosaurs, and its neck is one of the best preserved among the azhdarchids. Due to the fragmentary nature of the holotype vertebrae, it is unclear how Phosphatodraco is distinguished from other azhdarchids and how large it was: it may have had a wingspan of either 4 m (13 ft) or 5 m (16 ft). Its neck may have been 865 mm (2 ft 10 in) long. It would have had a proportionally long neck, small body, and long limbs, compared to other pterosaurs. The diversity in pterosaur taxa in the Ouled Abdoun Basin, including Phosphatodraco, right before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event suggests the extinction of pterosaurs happened abruptly. (Full article...)

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Holotype of Eatoniella mortoni

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In the news

Hénoc Muamba

An earthquake centred near Cianjur in Indonesia's West Java kills at least 271 people and injures more than 2,000 others.
In Canadian football, the Toronto Argonauts defeat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Grey Cup (MVP Hénoc Muamba pictured).
The International System of Units officially recognizes the metric prefixes quetta-, ronna-, ronto-, and quecto-.
NASA's Artemis 1 is successfully launched on an uncrewed test flight to the Moon.

On this day

November 24: Thanksgiving in the United States (2022)

FBI composite drawing of D. B. Cooper

1859 – British naturalist Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published, and sold out its initial print run on the first day.
1941 – The Holocaust: The Theresienstadt Ghetto was founded as a waystation to Nazi extermination camps and a "retirement settlement" for elderly and prominent Jews to mislead their communities about the Final Solution.
1971 – After collecting a ransom payout of $200,000, D. B. Cooper (depicted) parachuted out of the rear stairway of the airplane he had hijacked over the Pacific Northwest and disappeared.
2015 – A Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft was shot down by a Turkish fighter jet after the former allegedly strayed into Turkish airspace and ignored warnings to change course.

Zachary Taylor (b. 1784)
Arundhati Roy (b. 1961)
Goo Hara (d. 2019)

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Today's featured picture

The turkey is a large bird in the genus Meleagris, native to North America. There are two extant turkey species: the wild turkey (M. gallopavo) of eastern and central North America and the ocellated turkey (M. ocellata) of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. This photograph, taken at Deer Island Preserve in Novato, California, shows a male Rio Grande wild turkey (M. g. intermedia) strutting – the courtship display, in which the snood (the erectile, fleshy protuberance on the forehead) engorges with blood, becomes redder and elongates, hanging well below the beak.

Photograph credit: Frank Schulenburg

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