#pterosaur post

[he-who-needs-to-be-silenced]

[armadillollibamra-blog]

Free Speculative Evolution Prompt Saturday

What if birds never evolved, and pterosaurs survived into the Cenozoic?

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

The duality of pterosaurs...

[barghest-land]

rhamphinion couple:) from february this year

[a-book-of-creatures]

It’s been nagging at me for a while, so I’m going to try to put together my thoughts on the Quetzalcoatlus sequence in Prehistoric Planet 2. In the grand scheme of things it’s tiny, insignificant, and I loved Prehistoric Planet, but I’m not going to turn down the opportunity to talk at length about scavenging birds.

(Spoilers (?) for Prehistoric Planet 2 ahead. Go watch it!)

I’m talking about the part where a Tyrannosaurus is driven off from an Alamosaurus carcass (presumably carrion and not killed by the tyrannosaur). The tyrannosaur is expressly stated to be concerned about losing an eye to those Whopping Big Beaks. The pterosaurs aggressively fly over it a few times and honk angrily until the tyrannosaur walks away in Shameful Defeat, leaving the carcass to the pterosaurian pterrors.

And that confused me.

Before I go on, I want to point out that this is not a Who Would Win discussion, I’m not going to argue for or against one or another. Not going to discuss if Tyrannosaurus should really have won because of the massive weight advantage and lack of fragile bones/wings, or if the big landlubber had it coming and the numbers and aerial advantage was too much. I’m not arguing about Quetzalcoatlus being scary or not either (it’s scary as all hell).

No, the issue I had was with the beaks.

This is the Quetzalcoatlus as it appears in the show.

Impressive beak, isn’t it?

But it’s not the beak of a flesh tearer.

Let’s back up a bit. Birds that eat meat by tearing it into manageable chunks typically evolve sharp, hooked beaks to make up for the lack of teeth. Like this eagle for instance.

Majestic. They make the cutest sounds too. Look up golden eagle sounds, don’t believe the red-tailed hawk propaganda.

Raptor bills look intimidating, but they’re not there for killing. They’re cutlery. The talons do all the work, and then the beak tears up the meat into delicious gobbets of protein.

Even shrikes get in on the act. They don’t have killer feet, so they use their ripping bills to impale prey and tear at it.

Aw, look at it, it thinks it’s accipitrids.

The Quetzalcoatlus’ bill, though, doesn’t have that hook. It doesn’t look like the bill of a bird that dismembers its food. The closest thing I could think of to compare it with was stork bills. Specifically the marabou.

Ol’ pickaxe-for-a-face. This is the beak of an animal that stabs smaller prey and swallows them whole with minimum processing.

But a bill this long and pointed, turns out, is good for stabbing but not for tearing meat. Marabous are scavengers, but they won’t tear apart a carcass on their own. The “[b]ill [is] not well designed for dismembering carcasses, so [it] normally steals scraps from vultures or snatches up morsels that are dropped” (del Hoyo, Elliott, and Sargatal, 1992).

As you can see, vultures retained the hallmark accipitrid steak knife face, and are much better at Ripping and Tearing. This one (the lappet-faced vulture) generally goes first, being big and strong enough to Rip and Tear tough hide and get to the fleshy interior.

In fact, “[d]espite its huge bill, the [marabou] stork can rarely dominate a carcass and normally stands by the much more numerous vultures and nips in from time to time to snatch morsels which are dropped by others, though Tawny Eagles (Aquila rapax) in turn often steal food from the stork. The bill is not apparently very effective for cutting up meat and dismemberment is normally carried out quite simply by pulling” (del Hoyo, Elliott, and Sargatal, 1992). And if marabous have trouble with the average carcass, I wouldn’t imagine Quetzalcoatlus would fare much better with a titanosaur, which presumably has rather thick skin too.

One big happy family. That’s a much smaller carcass being shared (with the obligatory squabbling) by a whole bunch of dinosaurs. Neither vultures nor marabou are trying to monopolize it.

So... I don’t see why the big stork pterosaurs would chase away a perfectly good meat processor. I know everyone wants to see Big Prehistoric Animals Fighting With Lethal Intent, and everyone wants to see Tyrannosaurus Getting Knocked Down A Peg By The New Hotness, but I think it would have been a more interesting and believable scene - not to mention more in keeping with Prehistoric Planet’s attempt to be as scientifically believable as possible - if the pterosaurs acted like marabous the size of giraffes, both them and the tyrannosaur keeping a respectful distance of each other, and snapping up bits of meat left behind. And maybe the pterosaurs pulling the dinosaur’s tail for good measure, the way ravens bully eagles.

But it would make for a much less exciting scene. Who wants to watch a bunch of scavengers milling around a carcass and honking at each other as they jockey for the best morsels and settling their differences in ways that involve as little risk as possible? I mean, I do, but I don’t assume the average viewer does.

And that concludes my altogether far too long opinion on a single scene from a great series. Of course, I’m not a paleontologist and never will be, I’m only approaching this with what I know about birds, so please feel free to let me know if there’s any details of Quetzalcoatlus anatomy that do in fact suggest it could rip and tear!

References

del Hoyo, J.; Elliott, A.; and Sargatal, J. eds. (1992) Handbook of the Birds of the World, Vol. 1. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

[thylacines-toybox]

Peebles (she/her)

A soft lifesize-ish Peteinosaurus sewn by me in November 2022

[joeled]

doodle

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

are pycnofibers and feathers the same structure just diverged early on?

Short answer: Maybe, but really the question is kinda unanswerable currently

Long answer: The answer to this are built on not just one maybe, but multiple layers of maybes. To start with, in case anyone's unfamiliar, let's talk about analogous and homologous structures. In evolutionary biology, a physical feature is homologous if it is shared between two species, and the common ancestor of those two species also had that feature. A common example is that the arm of a human and the wing of a bird are homologous, because we share the same pattern of bones and our distant common ancestor had those same bones!

On the other hand, a physical feature is analogous if it has a shared function, and it may or may not share an evolutionary origin! So for example, a bat's wing and a bird's wing are both analogous (same function, powered flight) and homologous (same bone pattern shared with common ancestor). A bird's wing and a dragonfly's wing, however, are analogous, but are not homologous (they do not share an evolutionary origin).

This table sums it up in a way that I find helpful, comparing analogous structures in insects and mammals. Via Wikimedia Commons.

So, the fuzz on dinosaurs and pterosaurs are pretty evidently analogous structures. They provide the same functions: temperature regulation, probably display, possibly smoothing the body's silhouette in flight? But the key question is, are they homologous? Did the common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs also have fuzzy structures?

Now, let's get to those multiple layers of maybes, starting with the issue of whether even dinosaurs had a fluffy common ancestor. We see evidence of filamentous structures in both theropods and ornithischians. These structures maybe come from the same evolutionary origin, and if they do, then the common ancestor of all dinosaurs right at the base of the tree also had filaments. As far as I'm aware, whether or not this is likely is a fairly subjective matter, but as you can probably tell from my palaeoart I lean towards the idea that dinosaurs were ancestrally fluffy.

This little fellow, Lagerpeton, is one of the closest things to a dinosaur that isn't actually a dinosaur. If the ancestor of all dinosaurs was feathery, this guy probably was too!

If dinosaurs were ancestrally fluffy, then maybe the filaments of dinosaurs and pterosaurs come from the same evolutionary origin. If ancestral dinosaurs were fuzzy, that puts two very closely related lineages of fuzzy archosaurs very close together in time, some point in the Middle Triassic probably. If that's the case, then it makes sense that the common ancestor of these two groups was probably fuzzy.

However, you'll probably notice that this hypothetical scenario where ancestral fuzz is likely is constructed on top of the assumption that dinosaurs were ancestrally fuzzy, which is something that's still not fully proven. It's not even certain that all dinosaur fuzz is homologous, which makes pterosaurs tricky.

Even whether the earliest pterosaurs, like Peteinosaurus, had pycnofibres is currently only a matter of hypothesis!

The reality is the evidence which would most easily resolve the mystery currently does not exist. If, say, a Triassic dinosaur and Triassic pterosaur were discovered with fuzzy filaments then that would basically confirm that these two very close groups we both ancestrally fuzzy. Even better still would be some basal avemetatarsalian from the Middle Triassic with preserved fluff. That's basically like asking for the Holy Grail though, a genuine common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, the oldest records we do have for feathered dinosaurs and pycnofibred pterosaurs stop at about the Middle Jurassic. Any older than that, and we lose the sites with immaculately fine silt grains that preserve soft tissue like feathers. That's not to say a future beautiful Middle Triassic silt bed couldn't show up, and oh boy I really hope one does eventually, but for now there's simply nothing out there to offer concrete proof.

Jeholopterus, an anurognathid pterosaur from the Middle to Late Jurassic of China, preserved with evidence of pycnofibres. Via Wikimedia Commons.

So in the absence of this proof, what do we do? I'd consider Occam's Razor a decent guiding principle here, although it's less reliable in some other areas of evolutionary biology. Occam's Razor basically states that the most reasonable explanation is one that doesn't unnecessarily multiply the entities of a problem.

To put it another way, it seems more reasonable, in an evolutionary sense, that three closely related groups (ornithischians, theropods, and pterosaurs) got their fuzziness from one fuzzy common ancestor. The alternate explanation is that two (or possibly three) very closely related groups all independently evolved remarkably similar feathery coats from being initially scaly.

Occam's Razor isn't foolproof, and there's a reason that we have the term convergent evolution, but in this case I think we should consider it a reasonable guess that the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs had some sort of fluffy filaments, and that feathers and pycnofibres are indeed homologous.

But just to be clear, this is not the answer!! This is a best guess, a hypothesis based on available lines of evidence that disappear in the crucial stages of its evolutionary history, and the application of a logical rule of thumb to cap it off. Just because that's the side I lean towards, doesn't mean that the issue is settled or that I wouldn't change my perspective if new evidence came to light. That's the great thing about science after all!

So, I do hold to my original statement that right now, this question is not truly answerable (even though I've now spent almost 1000 words trying to answer it). We can guess and hypothesise, but for now the real answer remains out of reach.

[thysanniia]

I'd love to see a Hatzegopteryx if you ever find the time <3

sorry it's late but yessss nothing quite like a good giant murder stork! she is so ugly i love her <3

[olessan]

[balanceoflightanddark]

Bigger, Scarier, More Teeth

Paleontology is, by its very nature, a very speculative science. For most of its history, we've only had fragmentary remains of ancient animals that sometimes have no easy modern day counterpart to compare with. Of course, the field is also good at self correcting these errors, which means our image of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures is constantly evolving. While admittedly we may never know with 100% accuracy what these animals were like, we can certainly narrow down and tweak our perception to come up with the closest possible image.

Then...there's instances where dinosaurs were deliberately modified. Not a case of misidentification mind you. Cases where the animal was physically altered in order to seem more impressive or threatening.

Case in point: the Giganotosaurus from Jurassic World Dominion. One of the most recent examples, the Giga was depicted with a row of spines running along its crocodilian esque back. Naturally, we have no evidence of these in actual specimens and was probably added to make the final big carnivore of the series look more threatening.

Admittedly I'm not gonna harp on too hard about this since there is a difference between a fictional portrayal and something that's supposed to be accurate and the Jurassic Park series isn't really known for its accuracy. This is honestly just a bench mark for what we're working with and a notable and recent example.

What's a bit more headscratching when said altering happens in more scientific portrayals of dinosaurs.

Take shrinkwrapping for example. For decades, shrinkwrapping was the standard fair in portraying dinosaurs. What it involved was basically showing visible bone structures underneath the skin of the animal.

The results were...

...basically skeletons with skin stretched over them.

The idea, as pointed out by Mark P. Witton in the link above, is not just to portray them as fast, agile, bird like animals, but also matching a popular but inaccurate depiction:

Secondly, images of prehistoric animals as heroically-built, powerful beings are preferred by many merchandisers and palaeoart fans, these interpretations most closely matching the erroneous but popular portrayal of prehistory as a savage struggle for survival, where only the most powerful animals survived.

Thing was, these depictions completely ignored the muscle and tissue underneath the skin which gives the animals more bulk in favor of portraying them as more intimidating. Which in retrospect didn't work since if a dinosaur looked shrink-wrapped in real life, it probably was starving, ill, or basically on the verge of death.

In contrast, there are some artists that go the complete opposite direction. As is the case with David Peters and his...unique look at pterosaurs.

David Peters, a once respected independent researcher and artist, once claimed that he was able to identify hidden features and anatomical structures in pterosaur remains that no-one else had been able to identify. These include elongated fleshy crests, spines, and extravagant feathers.

The results speak for themselves. It's almost astonishing that anybody would think that any animal could even fly with that amount of extra weight and protrusions.

Now while we can poke fun at paleoart all day, the thing is that altered dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals aren't just restricted to art alone. There have been cases where specimens themselves have been altered to look more impressive.

Such is the case with Irritator challengeri, a spinosaurid first discovered in Brazil, South America in 1996. While the original specimen is noted for having one of the most complete skulls of any spinosaurid anywhere, its name is referring to a much more...interesting background.

Irritator wasn't actually discovered by scientists. It was purchased from a fossil dealer which made its way to Germany’s Stuttgart State Museum of the Natural Sciences. In this case, material from the back of the skull had been removed, and placed on the tip of the snout, making the skull appear longer. Presumably this was to make the specimen more marketable. Paleontologist David Martill and his team had to painstakingly remove the altered bit of the snout and restore them to their original location. It was such a pain, they eventually named the species Irritator due to the difficulty of removing and reattaching the material without damaging the specimen.

But even the case of Irritator is nowhere near the levels of altering than the case of Archaeoraptor. AKA: the dinosaur that was completely made up.

Like with Irritator, the Archaeoraptor specimen was an altered fossil (also known as a chimera) sold on the fossil market. Though instead of a single specimen, it was several individuals put together to create a complete product that would sell for a much higher price. Smuggled out of China and sold in the US for $80,000 USD during 1999, it ended up in the hands of amateur dinosaur enthusiast Stephen Czerkas who wanted it to be the centerpiece of his museum in Blanding, Utah. Working with noted paleontologist Phil Currie and Chris Sloane of the National Geographic magazine, they determined that the specimen was the long sought-after missing link between dinosaurs and birds. A groundbreaking discovery like this would've revolutionized the field. So much so the magazine did a story on it and christened it Archaeoraptor even before a more formal study could be conducted.

The result: a complete disaster and embarrassment to both paleontology and National Geographic when it was revealed to be a hoax. Creationists had a field day, practically tearing the reveal apart and used it as evidence against paleontologists and their work. The zeal for the missing link resulted in an absolute blunder for science.

Ironically though, it's now believed that the two species used in the specimen belong to Yanornis (an early bird) and the famous Microraptor, both of which are stronger contenders for the title of "missing-link".

Here's a link to an excellent video by Dino Diego that goes into detail if you're interested: The Bizarre Archaeoraptor Hoax - YouTube

Needless to say, the field of paleontology is full of fabrications and falsehoods. And more often than not it's difficult to truly pick out what's real and what isn't. Which is a problem since it draws into question the validity of both research done by paleontologists, the work of paleoartists, and the very specimens themselves. Naturally it should come to no surprise that researchers need to be diligent in how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are portrayed and studied. Especially when sensation overcomes the truth many work so hard to find.

[he-who-needs-to-be-silenced]

Drew this

The scale is a little weird but do this by myself at night

You ever fall in love with a prehistoric animal not because of other reconstructions but because of your own?

can we go back to Simurghia yet

Discount Pteranodont (jk love you tethydraco)

The child predator

and Jerry

[barghest-land]

gentle wind - angustinaripterus hiding from the storm in a little shelter. there are about 5 different sequences for the rain drops :] art is under the cut

[geniepuppet]

Asmodeus had to have some part in saving them from the asteroid, right?

We hear the beats of the song "Asmodeus" (A-S-M-O-D-E-U-S) (Demonic Possessions of Loudon) at the end of the finale song (and right as we see Ryan grab the lamp, alluding to the Genie and his previous deal - and thus Asmodeus), ending RIGHT BEFORE the asteroid is supposed to have hit the Dino-family

The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs

I think this either alludes to the fact that Asmodeus was the original means of getting The Professor to the Cretaceous Period (via forced Genie wish) AND/OR that Asmodeus somehow also got them out of there, which is where my theory begins

The Genie himself said that wishing to bring them back should've worked, meaning that whatever wish was made was not able to be granted

But what if it didn't work (at least immediately) because they were already somehow on their way back? That, by bringing them back by themself, Asmodeus voided that that wish could be granted in the first place because The Professor was already out of the Cretaceous?

Another note of interest is that The Professor himself didn't find a way to get out of the Cretaceous Period on his own. Even he's confused when he appears back in modern times, meaning he didn't time travel his way back - we know that he has something in his satchel that allowed him to time travel, but 1) he has a new satchel and 2) he didn't reach inside it to time travel (like he did in The Great Molasses Flood)

Asmodeus themself said they were born "in the time before time," (Demonic Possessions of Loudon) meaning that Asmodeus still existed back in the Cretaceous Period, meaning this could be plausible

This would also explain how the Dino-parents are also in modern times alongside The Professor, because Ryan couldn't have wished for them to come back - he didn't even know about them. Maybe, if Asmodeus was involved, they also brought the Dino-parents back because they noticed The Professor being close with them (hugging in what they believed were their last moments) or they were just in the same vicinity as The Professor and got picked up by being nearby him

Another small note that may or may not be important is the constant referencing to the bird that's chirping, first brought up by Dino-mom. It's what sings the last 2 notes of Asmodeus perfectly in-time with what it had been doing in previous episodes (America's First Black Aviatrix) and was drawn to attention when we first cut to The Professor being already hatched (Vietnamese Sisters). Maybe Asmodeus had been posing as or possessing that bird in order to keep watch over The Professor (and thus the Dino-family)?

Tl;dr: The likelihood of Asmodeus being involved in saving The Professor and his Dino-family is definitely a possibility and is alluded to by the end of the finale song beats, bird chirps, and context clues

Also, knowing Shane, foreshadowing, "coincidence," and "meaningless" details are important

[c-kiddo]

brother you would not believe how autistic i am about azhdarchids

[serpentariusart]

Attack #3 for @jayrockin