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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.
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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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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.
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For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
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?
Idiot, they're extinct.
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.
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.
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.
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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huge piece of spline
I found one, but it turned out just to be a piece of NURBS
Monstar L
"There is nothing close to pterosaurs alive today."
Best news I've heard all day.
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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.
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>> 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.