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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
Pterosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants and we don't know quite what their closest relative was
I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess that the closest relative to a Pterosaur would be another Pterosaur.
Either that, or a Spitfire.
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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.
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If I recall correctly, there was a spwan of the pterosauri constantly appearing in the books I read all the time in my early childhood with an estimated wingspan of about 15 to 18 meters, as well.
:-(
I am NOT going to watch quietly Quetzlcoatlus getting buried in oblivion!!1
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YTARY!
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.
Dinosaurs were big.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
...without photographs!
How can you say, hey I found something really cool! And then don't show any one. I mean, really?! Come on!
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? They talk about mating patterns, herding, sounds they made... I mean, I love a good BS fest like anyone else, but, seriously, does anyone else think they are just sitting around a pub seeing who can make up the most ridiculous "dinosaur sound" and get it published? They probably just record the "dinosaur sounds" their kids make.
I guess that is the benefit of being in a profession where, if you are careful, you can't really be proven wrong. They must be the ones keep time travel technology under wraps...
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
Quetzalcoatlus
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
"Who keeps Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the time travel under wraps? We do..."
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
Todays gliders made of composites have a wingspan of 18 meters. Actually they vary from 15 to 24 meters, but 18 meter is a standard class. Optimal speed is usually around 90 km/h and minimum speed is around 70 km/h. Of course a glider is built to carry a payload of about 100 kg.
Pterosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants and we don't know quite what their closest relative was
My mother in law.
Being under modern birds at the wrong moment can be bad enough. Can you imagine what being shat upon by one of these would be like?
this clearly contradicts the bible and can't possibly be true
Idiot, they're extinct.
This may not make any difference, but pterosaurs were not actually dinosaurs (they are Archosaurs). They are closely related however. c.f. http://www.projectexploration.org/news_121803.htm,
"Pterosaurs are close cousins of the dinosaurs but had a very different look and lifestyle. Their bodies were covered by hair-like structures that arose independently from the hair we know today on mammals,"
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They are reptiles, related to dinosaurs but not considered dinosaurs themselves, and have no close relationship to birds.
Birds-related dinosaurs were small theropods (bipedal carnivorous, Tyranosorus Rex and Velociraptor are theropods for example, but not from the line that led to birds)
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It depends on how you define "efficient". TFA doesn't clarify exactly with which version of "Spitfire" they were comparing the Pterosaur, but a Supermarine Spitfire Mk.XIX has a top speed of 740 km/h, maximum weight of 4082 kg on take-off, flying range of 2495 km, reaches up to 13100 meters altitude. All this with a wingspan of just 9.95 meters. I would like to see any living being top those specs.
I for one welcome our airplane sized extinct reptile overlords
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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.
That would be a person hanging from a 18m span glider on a fish eating diet?
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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.
here
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.
Yeah, they're like giant chicks
It is you who are being absurd.
Yes, they've only found fragments of wing bones of these very large ones. But those fragments are exactly like the wing bones of smaller pterosaurs which they already have complete skeletons for, only larger. The statement about legs and knuckles is based on more complete skeletons from smaller specimens.
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That's never stopped the "Bank of Nigeria" from sending me email about lost fortunes from unknown relatives before. Either that or the wife or daughter of the late President Pterosaur will be contacting me shortly.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
huge piece of spline
I found one, but it turned out just to be a piece of NURBS
Monstar L
Since more than 60 kinds of pterosaurs are known even a few fragments of a new species can provide enough information to support an hypothesis about their size. You don't have to be a paleontologist to understand that.
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Indeed...
"...not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments..." - Dr Greg Kirby
"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone." - Dr Tim White
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
We know they had wings...but how do we know they flew? They could have lost flight when they evolved to be so big.
"There is nothing close to pterosaurs alive today."
Best news I've heard all day.
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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.
>> 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.
Idiot, they're extinct.
I for one bid farewell to our extinct airplane sized reptile overlords.
Right, screw that server-side scripting to generate animated gifs of the dinosaurs. Programmers are expensive. Just put in a href="http://t-rex.dinosaurs.org" .
-Dave
Imagine the pterror that other creatures must have felt when it came winging over the ptreetops. I would be ptrembling in my raptor-skin boots, for sure.
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Not enough statues large enough to perch on and crap all over.
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.