![]() Pterosaurs are much more than just pterodactyls, then. “ you should tend to find them all over the place – and we do, overall,” says Habib. One bit of evidence that hints at this is that we continue to find giant pterosaur fossils, of various species, in many different regions – from Eastern Europe to North America, the Middle East and Asia. However, Arambourgiania was likely able to soar for long periods and may even have had a flight range so big that it could essentially travel the world. ![]() It also wouldn’t have been highly manoeuvrable – especially with that pole-like neck. It wouldn’t have been a creature that constantly flapped to stay aloft, for example, because this would have required too much energy. Habib says that there are certain things we can rule out about a pterosaur like Arambourgiania, just because of its massive size. More material means paleobiologists are better able to infer how these giants may have actually lived – including how they moved and flew. For example, in an intriguing development last year that is yet to be peer-reviewed, researchers at the University of Michigan found several new fossils that they say belong to the pterosaur. But new material does turn up all the time, leaving open the possibility that we may soon know much more about Arambourgiania than we do today. Witton notes that far more fossil material survives for species like Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which helps to explain why that species has been more widely written about in the press and discussed in museum exhibitions. These help reveal a bit more about what this ancient flier looked like. Fossil skulls suggest that these creatures often had freakishly large heads, though they would have been lighter than they looked thanks to their thin but rigid bone structure.īesides the vertebra, we also have some additional fossils that likely came from Arambourgiania, including the end of a wing bone, or phalanx. This is probably what Arambourgiania and other giant pterosaurs with a similar profile did. “It wasn’t super flexible like the neck of a heron or swan.”įor a man-made plane made of metal, having so much mass out in front would be a problem, but Habib explains that a flying animal can compensate for balance during flight by adjusting its wings and shoulders. “That of course is quite interesting because we’re not particularly accustomed to seeing animals with long, relatively inflexible necks that fly,” he adds. “Like a pole on the end of a plane,” says Michael Habib, a palaeontologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. The fossil itself is a long, thin tubular bone that indicates the animal’s neck would have been massive and probably quite inflexible. We do know that it was found in Jordan and that the specimen was written about in a 1954 paper by Camille Arambourg, the French palaeontologist from whom the pterosaur gets its name. ![]() Mysteriously, no-one knows when it was discovered because documentation did not survive with it, but Witton thinks it was likely back in the 1930s or early 1940s. It’s hard to say much for certain about this impressive species of pterosaur, but what we know about its neck is based on one of a few surviving fossils – a vertebra, in this case a neck bone. “It’s about double the length of what we’d see in another giant pterosaur,” explains Witton.
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