A newly described fossil consists of a flying reptile with a smaller fish in its throat and a larger fish biting its wing.

Marine biologists have scoured sea floor sediments for decades, finding living creatures in the mud but never fossils in the process of forming. That's because when a sea creature dies, its carcass is totally recycled within weeks. So, if a creature's soft parts are going to fossilize, it has to happen extremely fast.

The area surrounding what is now Wuda, Inner Mongolia, once teemed with tropical plants before a tremendous ancient volcanic explosion overwhelmed it. The ash-entombed forest, buried between coal layers, left such remarkably preserved fossilized plants that artists and paleontologists have been able to reconstruct the former wet-forest landscape.