Sentences with phrase «pterosaur flight»
According to Palmer's reconstruction, pterosaur flight was slow but well - controlled, and pterosaurs could circle ominously in one area for hours, like a hawk or an eagle, perhaps waiting for prey to emerge from hiding.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ Not exact matches
An example of convergent evolution is the similar nature of the flight / wings of insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats.
The team compared the thickness of the bones» walls and their resistance to torsion — a twisting force that birds» wings withstand during flapping flight — with similar bones from several dinosaurs, flying reptiles called pterosaurs and modern birds.
No one would expect a baby bird to take flight immediately after hatching, yet paleontologists who have examined the first known pterosaur embryo think that's exactly what the fledgling reptiles once did.
Earlier this year Habib suggested that the largest pterosaurs took flight by using all four limbs to leap into the air — a technique similar to that used by some bats but quite unlike the take - off behaviour of modern birds.
However, Witton and Mike Habib of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have proposed that because they had short torsos, the largest pterosaurs weighed no more than 250 kilograms — and that their flight muscles were a massive 50 kilograms of that.
«We need to appreciate that pterosaurs had their own unique mechanisms of achieving flight,» he says.
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.
The slow - soaring pterosaur would have landed slowly as well, which might have helped preserve its flight - adapted light bones, unsuited for high impacts.
Without a living analogue, the mechanics of pterosaur take - off, flight and landing, have been part conjecture and part theory.
Flight has evolved four times so far: In birds, pterosaurs, insects and bats.
Pterosaurs are the earliest known vertebrates to have evolved powered flight and lived during the Early Cretaceous period.
According to scientists, pterosaurs had an extraordinary adaptation to flight, including pneumatic bones to lighten its weight, and an elongated finger supporting a wing membrane.
The Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve flight.