A monstrous, meat-eating flying reptile that had a wingspan of a small aircraft, could walk on all fours and stalked its prey on land has been found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.

Researchers from Mongolia, the United States and Japan and have been collecting the prehistoric animal’s skeletal remains since 2006, when Buuvei Mainbayar, a Mongolian paleontologist, discovered its first fossil remains in the western Gobi.

Buuvei Mainbayar showed the fossil to Takanobu Tsuihiji of the University of Tokyo, who said: “I immediately recognized that it might be a pterosaur and was astonished at its gigantic size. “Straight away, we went back to the site and discovered the rest of the specimen.”

What they found were the remains of a flying monster that would have stood 18 feet high on the ground and had a wingspan that rivaled the length of the two largest pterosaurs currently known: Quetzalcoatlus, found in Texas in the 1970s, and Hatzegopteryx, found in Romania in the 1990s.

The Mongolian pterosaur has not been officially declared a new species yet, because of its incomplete remains.