Fossil discovery:

A cliffside in Utah is found to be brimming with fossils from early in the age of dinosaurs.

SALT LAKE CITY — Paleontologists have discovered a cliff-side in Utah brimming with fossils that offers a rare glimpse of desert life in western North America early in the age of dinosaurs.

Among the discoveries in what used to be a lake shoreline between giant sand dunes is a new pterosaur that would have been the largest flying reptile of the time. It wielded its ferocious teeth and powerful skull to gobble up small crocodile type creatures as it soared over a desert about 210 million years ago.

“If you saw one of these things coming at you with its jaws open, it would freak you out of your mind,” said Brooks Britt, a Brigham Young University paleontologist who presented preliminary findings this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Dallas.

He and fellow paleontologists plan to publish the findings in a scientific journal next year. Eight different animals, most likely new, have been identified at a site discovered in 2009 near Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado line. The discoveries include a type of reptile with a head like a bird, arms like a mole and a claw on the tip of the tail called a drepa-nosaur. Also found were two different types of meat-eating dinosaurs, one related to the coelophysis, a scrawny dinosaur featured in the recent movie, “Walking with Dinosaurs.”

The pterosaur discovery is significant because it fills a gap in the fossil record between earlier, smaller pterosaurs and the giant ones that came later, said Brian Andres, a University of South Florida paleontologist who heard the presentation this week. Each side of its lower jaw had two fangs and 28 teeth. “This thing is built like an aerial predator,” Andres said.