Why pterosaurs arent dinosaurs

Chris Bennett, a paleontologist, dismissed both theories while showing me a Pteranodon fossil in the museum basement at the University of Kansas.

The animal looked comically out of proportion, with a stretched-out skull that dwarfed its torso and hind limbs. To explain its huge head, Bennett invoked the same reason that teenage boys swagger: To establish rank among the guys and to impress the girls.

While studying Pteranodon fossils, Bennett concluded that the adult specimens fell into two categories. One group had big crests and small pelvises. The other had small crests and big pelvises. The latter were females, Bennett reasoned, because the large pelvises helped in laying eggs. The big crests belonged to the males. Although the mating rituals of Pteranodon remain speculative, one aspect of its behavior is clear from the fossil record.

The remains of Pteranodon are found in rocks that lay more than a hundred miles kilometers out to sea in the Cretaceous period. This fish catcher, which had a wingspan of up to 24 feet 7. Aeronautical engineers once imagined that Pteranodon pushed the boundaries of animal flight. They calculated that a creature any larger would have been too heavy to lift itself into the air.

The beast that broke those rules glares down at visitors milling about the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, California. It is a life-size model of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with a yellow beak the size of a man and a wingspan wider than many of the planes exhibited nearby. Paleontologists estimate that this pterosaur and a related form had wingspans of at least 36 feet 11 meters , making them the largest flying animals known. Birds don't come close. The wingspan of the largest living bird, the wandering albatross, measures only 11 feet 3.

Quetzalcoatlus represents the pinnacle of pterosaur design, capping a trend toward larger sizes that had started at the beginning of the Cretaceous, million years ago. Unlike smaller pterosaurs, they could exploit natural up currents to stay aloft without having to flap continuously, said Paul MacCready, an aeronautical engineer. With their hollow bones, these pterosaurs had a super lightweight construction ideal for soaring.

As we circled underneath the Quetzalcoatlus in Santa Monica, MacCready pointed out its similarity to sailplanes, the most efficient of airplanes. Both have long slender wings designed to fly with minimum power. During flight, sailplane pilots routinely search for places where heat radiates from sunbaked earth, creating rising air currents called thermals.

Undoubtedly Quetzalcoatlus would have exploited thermals as well, lazily circling over the river deltas that once covered the Big Bend region of Texas. The triumphant reign of pterosaurs ended with this giant flier. At the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, a meteorite or comet slammed into Earth. That calamity—and other events—wiped out roughly three-quarters of all animal species, including all remaining pterosaurs and dinosaurs.

But the number of pterosaur species appears to have dwindled for millions of years before the cataclysm, suggesting that something else contributed to their fate. It could be that the evolutionary achievements of pterosaurs ultimately led to their downfall. Quetzalcoatlus and other late pterosaurs had evolved gigantic wings ideal for soaring, but the specialization came at a price.

Longer wings make an animal less maneuverable and don't work as well in the strong winds that may have been typical in the late Cretaceous, said Wann Langston, Jr. They were as light as butterflies, and if there were turbulent winds in the area, they would have had to remain on the ground," he said. And if climate deteriorates, the bigger the pterosaur, the bigger the disadvantage.

Whatever the cause of their demise, pterosaurs enjoyed unparalleled success. They trailblazed a path into sun-drenched skies before any other vertebrate. For million years they sailed the winds on the strength of a fragile finger.

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Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine. Travel My Hometown In L. Researchers said on Wednesday a poorly understood Triassic Period reptile group called lagerpetids, known from a few partial skeletons from the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Madagascar, appears to have been the evolutionary precursor to pterosaurs. Lagerpetids, first appearing about million years ago, were generally small and may have been bipedal insect-eaters. They could not fly.

The oldest-known pterosaurs appear in the fossil record about million years ago, with anatomies fully developed for flight including wings formed by a membrane extending from the ankles to an exceptionally elongated fourth finger. The rarity of fossils leaves major gaps in our knowledge about pterosaurs. How did they evolve flight?

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Thank you for your generosity and support! Skip to main content. Are Pterodactyls Dinosaurs? These pterrific facts will help you answer the popular question of whether pterodactyls are dinosaurs!