Beyond Real Time: Pterosaurs!!!

Artist reconstruction of Tupandactylus imperator. Credit: Bob Nicholls (CC BY)

Of all the animals yours truly would like to see, Pterosaurs top the list. Exotic, mysterious and above all else, spectacularly weird, these ancient flyers top the list in terms of what wonderful mischief nature can come up with to beguile us humans to the max.

Long before the first birds flapped and fluttered, pterosaurs took to the skies. These leathery-winged reptiles, their bodies coated with wispy filaments paleontologists call pycnofibers, were the first vertebrates to truly fly. Now experts are beginning to think pterosaurs and birds had more in common than previously assumed: An exquisitely preserved fossil from Brazil not only hints that pterosaurs’ peculiar filaments may have been true feathers but also suggests that this plumage could possibly have been as riotously colored as that of any modern toucan or tanager.

If both pterosaurs and dinosaurs had feathers, and if those feathers had variable shades for visual communication, then either those traits evolved independently in each branch or they go back to the common ancestors of both groups—reptiles that lived early in the Triassic Period more than 243 million years ago. “We feel that the common structure in dinosaurs and pterosaurs reflects shared ancestry,” McNamara says. Likewise, the findings add support to the hypothesis that some kind of feather or feather precursor was present among these Triassic reptiles, hinting that many more pterosaurs and dinosaurs wore feathery body coverings than paleontologists expected. Pêgas points out that no skin impressions, feathers or other body coverings from Triassic dinosaurs and pterosaurs have yet been found to test this hypothesis. Paleontologists are only just beginning to uncover the deep history of colorful fluff and fuzz, a line of inquiry that will have experts digging into the earliest days of the Age of Reptiles.

From the tiny to the huge, weird is their middle name. :)

Reconstruction of one of the studied short-tailed pterosaurs.

Credit: Yuan Zhang, Nature Ecology & Evolution

Even experts often resort to the word “bizarre” when describing pterosaurs, the winged dragons that ruled the skies for more than 160 million years. This is especially true of the group of short-tailed pterosaurs called anurognathids, which used to dart and bob through Mesozoic era forests like bats, hawking for insects.

Credit: Chase Stone

The Mesozoic era, which spanned the time from 251 million to 66 million years ago, is often referred to as the age of dinosaurs. But although dinosaurs reigned supreme on land back then, they did not rule the air. Instead the skies were the dominion of an entirely different group of beasts: the pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrate creatures to evolve powered flight and conquer the air—long before birds took wing. They prevailed for more than 160 million years before vanishing along with the nonbird dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, around 66 million years ago. In that time, they evolved some of the most extreme anatomical adaptations of any animal, living or extinct. The smallest of these aerial predators was the size of a sparrow. The largest had a wingspan that rivaled that of an F-16 fighter jet. Many possessed heads larger than their bodies, making them, in essence, flying jaws of death. Pterosaurs patrolled every ocean and continent on Earth. No animal in the Mesozoic would have been safe from their gaze.

Adaptations of these amazing flyers to their environment goes beyond imagination.

Skeletal reconstruction of a quadrupedally launching Pteranodon longiceps

Mark P. Witton1, Michael B. Habib

Pterosaurs were the first flying vertebrates and ruled the skies of the Mesozoic era. These flying arcosaurs appeared in the Triassic period and evolved during the Jurassic and Cretacic periods to highly-adapted forms. This infographic shows some of the most remarkable adaptations of pterosaur anatomy and physiology, including the anatomy of the wing or the structure and histology of the patagium (the pterosaur wing membrane), among others, depicted in Pteranodon, one of the most well-known groups of cretacean pterosaurs and an outstanding example of the degree of specialization acquired by pterosaurs.

Addendum. The strangest of them all were the Azhdarchid pterosaurs With wingspans up to 40 feet, as tall as a giraffe and weighing close to 500 lbs, they were the true terrors of the skies without question.