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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."
Pterosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants and we don't know quite what their closest relative was.
That's the worst sentence I've read all day.
From the article we read - "Only fragments of wing bones have been discovered", and yet later we read "Pterosaurs could walk on four legs using the "knuckles" of their hands." They did not find any evidence that they even *had* legs yet they make these bold and "authorative" statements that are for the most part based on nothing more than imagination. It's just like in the way distant future someone finding a single spark plug and claiming to be able to describe your complete car that it came from, including the colour of the paint. It's good to dig up these old bones and stuff and try to reconstruct creatures from long ago - providing you have a reasonable percentage of the pieces of the jigsaw, but to make assertions about parts you haven't even remotely got is not very scientific.
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. Well, that's retarded. Either the spitfire eats engines or the fish somehow directly provide lift.