Sentences with phrase «on pterosaur»

«On the other hand, pterosaurs seem perfectly capable of standing on their back legs, so a two - legged [bird - style] take - off, whether from a standing pose or running, seems equally plausible — depending on the pterosaur.»

«Hundreds of fossilized eggs shed light on pterosaur development.»

Not exact matches

Based on growth marks, the team estimates one of the individuals to be at least 2 years old and still growing at the time of its death, supporting the growing body of evidence that pterosaurs had long incubation periods.

Cunningham believes that a large pterosaur could launch itself without «running and a lot of mad flapping» — but he won't say how, because he's going to publish a paper on it.

Pterosaurs walked on all four limbs, and Habib has developed an anatomical model to explore how they might have launched themselves using their small hind limbs and larger «arms» which formed part of their wings.

Either way, the pterosaurs would have needed sophisticated neural control on a par with modern birds, the researchers say.

That's because the pterosaur used its wings to «stall» as birds do, says the team, so that the animal's body swung up from a horizontal flight position to near vertical, enabling it to land gently on its hind feet.

Although most pterosaur tracks show the animals walking on all fours, the first prints in the newly discovered tracks are of the rear limbs only.

A century of digging found no teeth from giant predatory dinosaurs, a sign that pterosaurs were the biggest and baddest predators on the island.

They portrayed pterosaurs as giant terrors of the skies, flying reptiles who snacked on large prey — and would in theory be dangerous even to humans.

New fossils now indicate some giant pterosaurs probably did dine on bigger prey, such as dwarf dinosaurs the size of a small horse, 70 million years ago on an island that became modern - day Transylvania.

Fossilized footprints indicate that pterosaurs walked on all fours, using their feet and the hands on their wings.

Paleontologist Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues uncovered a major clue on «Pterosaur Beach.»

Perhaps the mammals were feeding on worms and grubs, the small carnivorous dinosaurs were after the mammals, and the pterosaurs could have been hunting both the mammals and the small dinosaurs.

Colin Palmer, a graduate student at the University of Bristol, arrived at this conclusion by employing his expertise as a turbine engineer to carry out first - of - a kind tests on models of pterosaur wings in a wind tunnel.

Launching on four legs, the pterosaur would have flapped its wings till it caught these small pockets of warm air rising from ocean or hot land, and then coasted easily on these for several hours.

New fossils uphold that view, challenging a recent consensus that all pterosaurs were more like overgrown cranes that preyed on rat - sized baby dinosaurs.

Based on fossils discovered so far, it's known that toothed pterosaurs are generally abundant during the Cretaceous in Asia, Europe and South America.

Pterosaurs nested on land but their bones are often recovered from shallow marine rocks.

Great plant - eating dinosaurs roaming the earth, feeding on lush ferns and palm - like cycads and bennettitaleans... smaller but vicious carnivores stalking the great herbivores... oceans full of fish, squid, and coiled ammonites, plus great ichthyosaurs and long - necked plesiosaurs... vertebrates taking to the air, like the pterosaurs and the first birds.

«These fossils shed new light on the reproductive strategy, ontogeny, and behavior of pterosaurs,» researchers wrote in their report,» published online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The latest findings are based on the discovery of a new species of pterosaur from the Patagonia region of South America.

«The Daohugou Biota gives us a look at a rarely glimpsed side of the Middle to Late Jurassic - not a parade of galumphing giants, but an assemblage of quirky little creatures like feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs with advanced heads on primitive bodies, and the Mesozoic equivalent of a flying squirrel,» lead author Corwin Sullivan, an associate professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, was quoted as saying in a press release.

The latest study relies on only a few bones, so it does not provide definitive proof that small pterosaur species existed alongside the larger ones, says Alexander Kellner, a palaeontologist at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Pterosaurs («winged lizards») hold a special place in the history of life on Earth: They were the first creatures, other than insects, to successfully populate the skies.