Volcanologists want to put sensors directly into an Underground Magma Chamber Sep 16, Related Stories. New research proves that birds and flying reptiles were friends, not foes Oct 19, Nov 30, Aug 30, Pterosaurs should have been too big to fly — so how did they manage it?
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When we did this study, we thought pterosaurs would be the same," said Katy. But the amazing thing is that they didn't really begin to evolve until after the birds had appeared. They looked at 50 different pterosaurs that ranged in size from a blackbird to the largest of all, Quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan of 12 metres, four times the size of the largest flying bird today, the albatross. They tracked how all the pterosaur groups came and went through their history and recorded in detail their body shapes and adaptations.
The new work shows that pterosaurs remained conservative for 70 million years, and then started to experiment with all kinds of new modes of life. After birds emerged and became successful, the pterosaurs were not pushed to extinction, as had been suggested. It seems they responded to the new flyers by becoming larger and trying out new lifestyles. Many of the new lifestyle adaptations were seen in the pterosaurs skulls, as they adapted to feed on different food sources; some were seed-eaters, many ate fish, and later ones even lost their teeth.
The rest of the body also showed a surprising amount of variation between different groups, when considering that the body forms have to retain many features to allow flight. Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight, adapting to the skies long before birds would do the same. Masters of the Mesozoic skies, they flapped on wings composed of skin stretched out to meet the end of a ludicrously-elongated fourth finger. They ranged in size from fliers the size of a sparrow to giants like Quetzalcoatlus , a truly imposing saurian that would stand as tall as a giraffe when on the ground.
But what happened to these formidable fliers? Even though the last of the pterosaurs vanished at the same time as the likes of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops , considerably less attention has been paid to their demise. Scientists agree that the same ecological consequences that cut down the non-avian dinosaurs must have killed the last pterosaurs as well.
The aftermath of the asteroid impact is the large scale reason for both. But the question on the mind of pterosaur researchers, Andres says, is whether pterosaurs were in decline before the impact or not. A new discovery helps researchers begin to answer that question. Based on new finds in Morocco, Andres and colleagues report, we can say pterosaurs were still going strong until the very end. This change has been building discovery by discovery. For years, says University of Southampton pterosaur expert Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone , paleontologists thought that there was just one group of pterosaurs left at the end of the Cretaceous, immense fliers called azhdarchids.
But in recent years, pterosaur researchers have identified rare members of other groups in rocks of the same age. These fossiliferous tidbits have been hard-won. To read the story of a mass extinction, scientists need two things: the rocks that record the time just before the catastrophe, and the rocks from just after.
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