How do pterodactyls breed

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Crocodile-like reptiles reigned as top carnivores, while dinosaurs were increasing in number. The balance of power shifted as the Triassic closed. Extinctions dethroned the prevailing reptiles, and fleet, meat-eating dinosaurs took over. During this period pterosaurs went through their own transformations, diversifying into dozens of species that ruled the winds. A clue to their evolutionary success came from the Qaratai Karatau Mountains of Kazakhstan in the s when zoologist A.

Sharov discovered fossils of an unknown species with well-preserved hairlike fibers. He named the new pterosaur Sordes pilosus, or "hairy devil. Sordes clearly set pterosaurs apart from the reptiles known today.

Crocodiles and lizards don't need an insulating layer over their bodies because they are cold-blooded: Their body heat and activity rise and fall with the ambient temperature. But the fibers on Sordes suggest that pterosaurs needed to keep their body temperature elevated. It's one clue that they may have evolved an advanced, warm-blooded physiology similar to birds and mammals. This discovery of a "hairy" coat meshes perfectly with the animal's image as active fliers, said David Unwin, a paleontologist at Humboldt University's Museum of Natural History in Berlin.

Warm-bloodedness would have given pterosaurs the endurance to power their muscles for long periods of time. They would have crashed to the ground. Like all early pterosaurs, Sordes had a long reptilian tail. By the time of Sordes' last hurrah at the end of the Jurassic, million years ago, short-tailed pterosaurs called pterodactyloids had arrived. Over the next 80 million years these new forms would flourish, diversifying into an arkful of different species with unusual specializations for feeding and flight.

Some pterodactyloids evolved jaws lined with hundreds of needle-thin teeth, perfect tools for filtering tiny plants and animals from shallow lakes. Others such as the North American Pteranodon had no teeth. Its smooth jaws probably had a covering of hornlike material, similar to the beak of a bird. What Pteranodon lacked in teeth, it more than compensated for with its imposing skull.

One species had a head nearly six feet 1. Pteranodon and its crest have perplexed researchers since the s, when its bones turned up in the chalk layers of western Kansas. Some viewed the crest as a forward rudder, enabling the almost tailless pterosaur to steer while flying. Other scientists proposed that Pteranodon's crest served as an air brake: To slow down for landing, the animal would simply turn its head broadside to the wind.

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. Painful-looking punctures on the skulls of large theropod dinosaurs such as Gorgosaurus , Sinraptor and others indicate these dinosaurs bit each other on the face during combat, according to Darren Tanke and Philip Curie.

These fights were likely over mates or the territory through which prospective mates might pass. Tanke, Andrew Farke and Ewan Wolff also detected patterns of bone damage on the skulls of the horned dinosaurs Triceratops and Centrosaurus.

The wounds on Triceratops , in particular, matched what Farke had predicted with models of the famous horned dinosaurs: They literally locked horns. The confrontations that left these wounds could have happened anytime, but during the mating season is the likeliest bet. Ceratopsian dinosaurs have a wide array of horn arrangements and frill shapes, and some scientists suspect these ornaments are attributable to sexual selection.

These notions are difficult to test—how can we tell whether female Styracosaurus preferred males with extra-gaudy racks of horns, or whether male Giganotosaurus duked it out with each other over mating opportunities? But an unexpected discovery gives us a rare window into how some dinosaurs courted. For decades, conventional wisdom held that we would never know what color dinosaurs were. This is no longer true. Paleontologists have found more than 20 species of dinosaurs that clearly sported feathers, and these feathers hold the secrets of dinosaur color.

Dinosaur feathers contained tiny structures called melanosomes, some of which have been preserved in microscopic detail in fossils. These structures are also seen in the plumage of living birds, and they are responsible for colors ranging from black to gray to brown to red. It looked like a modern-day woodpecker, the analysis showed: mostly black with fringes of white along the wings and a splash of red on the head.

So far only one specimen of Anchiornis has been restored in full color, but so many additional specimens have been found that paleontologists will be able to determine the variation in color within the species, specifically looking for whether there was a difference between males and females or whether the flashy red color might be mating plumage. Through the discovery of dinosaur color, we may be able to understand what was sexy to an Anchiornis.

So where does all this leave the mystery of Stegosaurus mating? Pterosaurs first appeared in the late Triassic Period and roamed the skies until the end of the Cretaceous Period to 66 million years ago , according to an article published in in the German scientific journal Zitteliana.

Pterosaurs lived among the dinosaurs and became extinct around the same time, but they were not dinosaurs. Rather, pterosaurs were flying reptiles. Modern birds didn't descend from pterosaurs; birds' ancestors were small, feathered, terrestrial dinosaurs. The first pterosaur discovered was Pterodactylus , identified in by Italian scientist Cosimo Collini, who thought he had discovered a marine creature that used its wings as paddles.

A French naturalist, Georges Cuvier, proposed that the creatures could fly in , and then later coined the term "Ptero-dactyle" in after the discovery of a fossil skeleton in Bavaria, Germany. This was the term used until scientists realized they were finding different genera of flying reptiles. However, "pterodactyl" stuck as the popular term. Pterodactylus comes from the Greek word pterodaktulos , meaning " winged finger ," which is an apt description of its flying apparatus.

The primary component of the wings of Pterodactylus and other pterosaurs were made up of a skin and muscle membrane that stretched from the animals' highly elongated fourth fingers of the hands to the hind limbs. The reptiles also had membranes running between the shoulders and wrists possibly incorporating the first three fingers of the hands , and some groups of pterosaurs had a third membrane between their legs, which may have connected to or incorporated a tail.

Early research suggested pterosaurs were cold-blooded animals that were more suited to gliding than active flying. However, scientists later discovered that some pterosaurs, including Sordes pilosus and Jeholopterus ninchengensis , had furry coats consisting of hairlike filaments called pycnofibers, suggesting they were warm-blooded and generated their own body heat, according to a study in the Chinese Science Bulletin.

What's more, a study in the journal PLOS ONE suggested pterosaurs had powerful flight muscles, which they could use to walk as quadrupeds on all fours like vampire bats and vault into the air.