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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."
Its well known that press releases like this get sent out during the times at which a movie, tv show, or book are to be released.
In previous famouns anounced dinosaur discoveries, the dino's had already been well known among the reasearch community however the public hasnt heard of them so for films like Jurrasic Park 3, they anounced the dinosaur that is bigger than a Trex. Also back a year ago, they also anounced another dinosaur that just so happened to be during the release of a dinosaur mass marketed product (cant remember which though unforuntately)
There was a guy on NPR that explained this marketing strategy, as the expert dinosaur consultant on Jurrasic Park, he said Universal asked him to old back on announcing discoveries publically to coincide with all 3 of the Jurrasic Park films.
Old debate regarding petrosaurs. The evidence is far more in favor of a capable flyer than of an awkward at best glider or land bound creature. If you look at flightless birds you find they did not maintain large wings but quickly became almost vestigil. Think Ostritch or Emu... and in their cases the legs grew to compensate for the awkwardness of having largely useless wing limbs.
In the case of petrosaurs, and this one in particular, it was absolutely domninated by its wings and obviously would have had problems dealing with them on the ground. So they would have been extremely vulnerable on the ground if they lived there... and that dosn't argue well for survival.
Another issue is the one of material strength. go look up the discussions of modern physiologists with regards to three very serious problems in their eyes with the physiology of Dinosaurs. Petrosaur Wings, T-Rex bipedal status as a Carnivore that had to be quick to catch prey, and the Sauropod Neck. To make a long story short modern, physiology says that current bone and muscle structures could not support these structures. Their knwoledge of what current tissue and bone structures can do and how they work is pretty good. And yet they are not so silly as to simply ignore the record of fossils. But there is a serious problem here in if there was some stronger biological capacity for the dinosaurs that would mean a more fit evolutionary deveolpment lost out to a less fit one. So that gets the evolution camp up in arms. To say the evidence of what these animals were capable of gets the palientologists up in arms. Besides there is really not much arguing that sauropods had gigantic long necks, T-Rex walked on its hind legs and that Petrosaurs Flew. There also is little dispute that moder physiologists understand muscles and bones of current biology to a great degree.
Yet in the end the knowledge does not add up to a satisfactory conclusion. There the debate sits. One of the funner explinations of how they could all be right has to do with gravity. Namely most of the structural problems acording to modern physiology begins and ends with what is needed to create and support these structures in Earth's gravity. If Earths gravity was not the same then as it is now then that opens the possibility that all camps are correct. But that argument opens up a serious can of worms, to say the least.
Anyway this find is going to stir up alot of those debates again. Cause the earlier debate about petrosaurs was never really closed. It sort of died down into an armed truce where physiologists simply say that they were primarily gliders... but something this big will have problems according to them even if all id did was try to support its weight... much less attempt to gain the air by flapping its wings. They can't both be right.... or can they? It is a very intresting discussion.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
I attended a lecture of Dr. Octave Levenspiel a few years back where he had solved the riddle of how something that big could fly.
It's called air pressure.
For anything to fly that is that big, he showed that the air pressure had to be four times what it is today. Here's a link to his paper. It also explains why dinosaurs could have such long necks and not pass out from loss of blood to their brains.
Great and really interesting paper.