Sentences with phrase «pterosaurs did»

The answer, according to Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth, UK, is that pterosaurs didn't fly like birds.

«Pterosaurs don't necessarily need land bridges to disperse because they can cross marine barriers between emergent landmasses, effectively «island hopping» from one continental mass to another,» Myers said.

Not exact matches

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.

Finding fossilized eggs containing 3 - D embryos opens a new window into pterosaur development, says coauthor Alexander Kellner, a vertebrate paleontologist at Museu Nacional / Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

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.

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.

When he first saw pictures of this unusual fossilized pterosaur skull from a private collection, Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, didn't think it was real.

But her team's new find, she says, may mean that, «pterosaurs were doing better than we thought.»

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.