Flying Reptile The Size of A Small Airplane

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a New Zealand Herald article about a pterosaur that has been discovered to have an almost 18 meter wingspan. From the article: "A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Pterosaurs did it on a diet of fish and a superb ability to utilise air currents, thermals and ground effects. There is nothing close to pterosaurs alive today. Pterosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants and we don't know quite what their closest relative was."

Comments

Good morning, Professor Falken ...

[DoktorTomoe]

people think they have never been, but once, the skies were full of them...

Right, Petrosaurs had a better fuel efficiency. They also didn't carry bombs over large distances and were likely not attacked by fighter planes.

Re:Good morning, Professor Falken ...

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Oh for god's sake, one of the natural wonders of the world is discovered, and the best we can come up with is a pissing contest about how we can make better machines. Guess what, the pterosaurs couldn't land on the moon or spit nuclear explosions either, aren't we great.

When you think about it, the likelihood of any fossils even existing, never mind surviving for us to find, is so low that its a miracle we have any record of what came before at all. I absoloutely guarantee that not one species in a million that existed in those days has left any sort of fossil record at all. Giant pterosaurs are most likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Besides, most of you are missing the the point, which is of course...

Here be dragons...

Well duh

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine," Martill said. "Pterosaurs did it on a diet of fish and a superb ability to utilise air currents, thermals and ground effects.

Muscles are the most efficient actuation devices for small sizes. Mechanical equivalents are either power-hungry, awkward (too large, too small, too limited in the ways they output their power...) or not flexible enough.

Muscles produce powerful, fine-grained motion, with only ridiculous amounts of sugar and oxygen. I'm not sure comparing a big dinosaur with a big airplane means anything, as one is the result of millions of years of evolution, and the other only 50 years.

Stupid comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, they might have had a greater wingspan, but they certainly didn't fly mach 1, neither did they weight thousands of kilograms. So the statement that they were able to outperform Rolls Royce engines by fish digestion is plain stupid.

Personally...

[demondawn]

...the use of fragments of a fossilized skeleton, while I admit can be useful, seems tenuous at best. Certianly I dislike the idea that such flimsy evidence is used to envision not only an entire animal's musculature, but the fact that it is recordbreaking as well. It has the flavor of pseudoscience, to me (but then of course, I'm not a paleontologist.)

Re:Personally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that depends what kind of fragments you find. If you find a huge toenail, huge piece of spline and a huge tooth, there is some pretty good chances the whole thing was big.

On the other hand, if you just find a huge toenail, it just might have been a big-footed dino.

And paleontologists can be proven wrong - all you need is to find a bone fragment that does not fit to the original reconstruction.

Re:Personally...

[Conanymous Award]

>> the use of fragments of a fossilized skeleton, while I admit can be useful, seems tenuous at best.

> I thought the same thing. Anyone else ever been to a museum where they found like, a tooth and toenail, and then reconstructed what the entire animal looked like?

Well, I am a paleontologist, and I can *definitely* tell you that *nobody* in this profession makes hypotheses on sounds, mating patterns etc. based on a toenail of an extinct animal. That kind of BS allegations is reserved to strawman-building creationists.

You know, museums often have only some isolated bones of an animal that *is*, however, known better from other bones, or then its close relative might be known. In cases like Parasaurolophus, a duck-billed herbivorous dinosaur, there's some very good evidence about the sounds it might have made, and it's known from complete skeletons, including skulls. Evidence for herding in dinosaurs can be found from fossilized nests and footprints.

Same principle goes for cases like this new pterosaur. We only have some wing bones of this creature (pterosaur bones are very fragile), but we also have loads of complete skeletons of other pterosaur genera. If we take the wingbone proportions of these animals and compare them to the new-found bones, we can make a pretty good estimation of its size. Of course, we have to remember two things: sometimes even scientists like to exaggerate things, even if just a little - a bigger fish makes a bigger story. But usually it's the media, though, that makes a mountain out of a molehill. I know too many examples of this.

flying prehistoric giants

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes some imagination after looking at bones to reconstruct in the mind or a drawing a bird that large. I guess a bird that would be floating on high and the bird could swoop over the water and grab fish. It is too bad that there are not some of those old adventure stories on radio that people especially young adults could learn to use their imagination. Visualizing these huge birds flying around or maybe soaring around would be something to see whether real or in the mind. It too bad there are not some of the old Two Adventure Stories that used have real action but well written that portrayed pictures by the use of words. Oh well have fun.

Here's a better comparison

[mangu]

the statement that they were able to outperform Rolls Royce engines by fish digestion is plain stupid

Instead of comparing pterosaurs with powered airplanes, they should compare them with powered gliders, which operate on similar specs. Look here and here for examples.

Talk about stupid comparisons...

[Colin Douglas Howell]

(meaning the one in the original article, not the comment.)

It seems the "pterosaur vs. Spitfire" comparison is in many of the articles discussing this, so I suppose it might come from the initial press release, but it's still pointless. It's even more idiotic in the way it's phrased: A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Well, yes, and if it had a smaller wingspan it would need an even more powerful engine. All other things being equal, you need less power to fly with larger wings, not more.

Not to mention the fact that this supposed 60-foot pterosaur (similar claims were made for Quetzalcoatlus when fragments of it were first found, so some caution is warranted) probably weighed no more than 200 pounds, and perhaps a lot less. Pterosaurs were incredibly light for their size.

If you're going to compare pterosaurs with aircraft, do it with the extremely light, long-winged planes used to set records for human-powered flight.

Re:How do we know they flew?

[tmortn]

Actually in terms of survival that does make the bactieria more advanced... or at least more robust. And that does go somewhat counter to the subscribers of ever increasing complexity and success to evolution. The presence of bacterium unchanged for million/billions of years is in and of itself something of an unaccounted for expression of evolution. IE why did they not change ? Evolve ? Did they really reach the peak of what they could be all that time ago and never recieve a challenge from a more complex life form that would have driven them to extinction? If they are so perfect then how did any other form of life ever evolve away from it?

And yes evolution is widely subscribed to. I subscribe to it. But the devil is in the details. And true enough fit is an abstract concept to be taken in context. But when 99% of historical context says stronger bones and muscles would be a better thing I think you can make the argument that the dinosaurs may have been a case of a higher biology that failed... given that is the answer to the puzzle of dino deminsions. It is not the only possibility. My whole point really was that we don't know and that it is interesting.