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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."
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.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.