In the world of survival of the fittest, flight has numerous advantages. It allows creatures to escape from predators on the ground, diversify their diet and ambush prey from above. Flying also enhances an animal’s ability to travel, forage, and find mates. Surprisingly, only three groups of vertebrates have developed the ability of sustained, muscle-powered flight. Pterosaurs, also known as “wing lizards,” emerged in the Triassic Period, potentially around 237 million years ago, thus predating birds by 70 million years and bats by over double that time. Despite their success, pterosaurs met their demise at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs, caused by an asteroid that eradicated over 75% of all life on Earth. However, experts have yet to ascertain the mechanics behind the emergence of pterosaurs in the first place, as transitional fossils are absent. Nonetheless, researchers have managed to piece together a vague idea regarding their evolutionary origins and their evolution from small and agile animals to a diverse group of creatures that occupied ecosystems globally.
Pterosaur fossils surfaced in the late 1700s, originating from the same German limestone formation that would later yield the first-known dinosaur, Archaeopteryx. For a time, scientists grappled with identifying the fossils’ nature, with some believing they were intermediate between birds and bats, while others considered them a type of aquatic creature. Eventually, researchers determined that pterosaurs were flying reptiles separated from dinosaurs. The initial species discovered was named Pterodactylus antiquus, the name coined from the Greek term for “wing-finger,” even though the descriptor “pterosaurs” is much wider than this.
Although pterosaurs differ from bats in the way their wings are configured, with the latter having their wing membranes stretched between the elongated fingers of their hands, they share the peculiarity that both can fly when first appearing in the fossil record. As for how pterosaurs developed flight, no evidence of transitional or pre-phyletic fossils has been earlier found. The earliest fossils of the pterosaurs date back to around 219 million years ago, although they probably originated about 237 million years ago. Baron mentions that pterosaur fossils are not easily found, as rocks from that time are not widespread, and many of the pterosaur bones were hollow, leading to their destabilization after death and during fossilization.
Nonetheless, researchers have used comparative studies to try to understand how pterosaurs developed the ability to fly. A 2020 analysis on the anatomy of primitive dinosaurs, early pterosaurs, and several of the reptile varieties living in the same epoch or earlier revealed that pterosaurs’ closest extant relatives were lagerpetids, so-called because the proportions of their limbs are akin to that of rabbits. Last year, a separate study in Nature discovered that a small reptile, about 20 centimeters long with slender limbs and small hands – called Scleromochlus taylori – that lived about 230 million years ago was closely related to both lagerpetids and pterosaurs and could have served as a stand-in for the sort of animal that pterosaurs evolved from. Researchers generally accepted that a terrestrial creature like S. taylori is less likely to glide and more likely to spend more time on the ground than in trees. Nonetheless, the fact that S. taylori had a small pelvic girdle seems to indicate that it was not a leaper, which posed challenges for the traditional view that a ground-dwelling creature must have taken to the skies by leaping then eventually evolving the ability of flight. However, experts have pointed out that being a leaper isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for flight evolution.
Pterosaurs’ diet is largely a matter of speculation, given that most fossils in finding only preserve indications of where they lived and how their anatomy differs from current animals. Comparing their anatomy with modern creatures, experts propose that pterosaurs were known to ingest everything, from small land vertebrates to crustaceans, worms, and insects. Nonetheless, researchers often have to find indirect evidence of what they ate, as with gastric pellets scraped from the fossils of Kunpengopterus sinensis, which show that pterosaurs ate fish like modern-day owls and seagulls do. Coprolites, fossilized poop, provide information that pterosaurs consumed foraminifera and marine worms that would have been part of their diet.
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