Palaeontology occasionally delivers its discoveries in unglamorous packaging. A fossilised mass of regurgitation, roughly 110 million years old and containing four fish and two pterosaurs, has yielded a species new to science: Bakiribu waridza, named in honour of the Kariri people of the Chapada do Araripe. The find, published in Scientific Reports, is the first filter-feeding pterosaur described in the tropics, the first found in Brazil, and the first animal ever named from a regurgitalite.
The specimen had sat in the collection of a museum in Natal, mislabelled as a fish, until a biology student noticed it did not match its neighbours. Detailed identification and classification drew on expertise at the Universidade de São Paulo's Museum of Zoology, where a specialist in pterosaur jaw biomechanics compared the material against known species, working alongside colleagues at federal and regional universities in Brazil's northeast.
Scientifically, Bakiribu fills a gap. Its dental structure represents an intermediate stage in the evolution of the filter-feeding ctenochasmatines, combining traits of European and South American forms, and its presence in the Araripe Basin reshapes understanding of how these comb-toothed pterosaurs spread during the Cretaceous. The fossil also records a moment of ancient violence: whatever large predator swallowed the animals brought them back up, accidentally gift-wrapping them for science.