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The Flying
Reptiles
Most of the weird flying creatures of dinosaur times 
are
not birds or flying dinosaurs. They are
flying reptiles or pterosaurs. Photogenic reconstructions of Pterosaurs seem to
be in short supply. This one is
copyright Joe Tucciarone. It is of Quetzalcoatlus. With a name like that,
it had to come from
The
flying reptiles are not the forerunners of birds. Or of bats, although their wings were made
of skin like bats. Bats don’t appear
until well into the Age of Mammals.
Most of the sources I’ve tapped say that nothing is
known about how the flying reptiles evolved.
They appear in the fossil record far earlier than dinosaurs or
birds. And they were clearly already
consummate flyers. But Wikipedia tells
us that they stem from a Triassic reptile called an ornithoderan. They offer this picture of it.
Like birds (and unlike bats) the flying reptiles had
hollow bones. You may think that birds
are incredibly light – and so they are, the good flyers anyway. But they are great heavy lumps compared with
the flying reptiles.
This diagram comes from ‘History of Life’ by Richard
Cowen, and illustrates how large the flying reptiles got. The smaller pterosaur depicts a Pteranodon, with a
7˝ metre wingspan; a bit smaller than
the Spitfire bottom right. The large one
is our friend Quetzalcoatlus, with a
wing span of 13˝ metres. (These are
clearly diagrams only. The two would
certainly not have looked identical in real life!)
How did they manage this? Click here for a
theory.
The pterosaurs
were in decline well before the end of the Cretaceous, with the K-T extinction
being the final straw. Nobody seems to
know why they declined. But I blame the
lack of oxygen (see the theory above).
© C B Pease February 08