Their whole splendid world, built on bones that were hollow and with paper-thin walls, has long since collapsed into dust. Thinking you’ll go out on a given day and find any trace of pterosaurs is like buying a Powerball ticket and then arguing about how to spend the winnings. This is the first rule of pterosaur research: You must be an optimist. But he and Nizar Ibrahim, a fellow paleontologist, promptly fall into a detailed discussion about how to obtain a research permit in the event of item two. ![]() The odds are almost infinitely better for item one. (2) Find a complete Quetzalcoatlus skull sitting on the ground. Heading out into the geological layer cake of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, British pterosaur researcher Dave Martill proposes a “to do” list for this brief reconnaissance: (1) Find a rattlesnake to admire. They’ve also given pterosaur researchers an almost insatiable appetite for more. These discoveries have given pterosaurs a vivid new life as real animals. Because she lacked a head crest, she provided the first solid evidence that for some male pterosaurs, as for some modern birds, big, brightly colored crests probably functioned as a sexual display device. Pterosaur) thus became the first pterosaur indisputably identified by sex. One egg even turned up in the oviduct of a Darwinopterus pterosaur from China, along with another egg apparently pushed out by the impact that killed her. Scans of intact eggs have revealed the world of embryos inside the shell and helped explain how the hatchlings developed. But it also included pterosaurs the size of sparrows that flitted through primeval forests and may have fed on insects, large pterosaurs that stayed on the wing across oceans for days at a time like albatrosses, and pterosaurs that stood in briny shallows and filter fed like pink flamingos.Īmong the most exciting finds is an assortment of fossilized pterosaur eggs. Their world included monsters like Quetzalcoatlus northropi, one of the largest flying animals yet discovered, nearly as tall as a giraffe, with a 35-foot wingspan and a likely penchant for picking off baby dinosaurs. Some paleontologists now suspect that hundreds of pterosaur species may have lived at any one time, dividing up habitats much as modern birds do. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īut a rush of fossil discoveries has brought to light surprising new pterosaur shapes, sizes, and behaviors. (A minor point: The last pterosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, eons before the first humans showed up at the party.) (Spoiler alert: She lives.) For an update, turn to 2015’s Jurassic World, and you’ll find that pterosaurs are still plucking humans skyward, the sad lot of the perennially typecast. Take a look, for example, at the 1966 film One Million Years B.C., in which a squawking, lavender pterosaur carries Raquel Welch off to feed the nestlings. ![]() We invariably imagine them as pointy-headed, leather-winged, clumsily aerial reptilians, with murderous proclivities. Scientists have since described more than 200 pterosaur species, but popular notions about pterosaurs-the winged dragons that ruled Mesozoic skies for 162 million years-have remained stuck. That’s the common name given to the first pterosaur discovered in the 18th century. Most people respond to the word ‘pterosaurs’ with a puzzled expression, until you add, ‘like pterodactyls.’ This story appears in the November 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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