Word: pterosaurs
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Poking through the fossil collection of The Netherlands' Teyler Museum in September, Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom spotted one musty specimen that looked odd to his trained eye. It was labeled pterosaur, a flying reptile that inhabited the earth from 65 to 200 million years ago. But when Ostrom held the fossil to the light, he saw the distinctly unreptilian impression of a feather. "My heartbeat began going up fast," recalls Ostrom, who quickly recognized that the specimen was not a pterosaur at all. It was, in fact, a far rarer prehistoric aviator: an Archaeopteryx (literally "ancient wing...
Arizona. Huge, beaked reptiles gliding on batlike wings, the pterosaurs reached their greatest size in the Chalk Age (60-130 million years ago), achieved wingspreads up to 30 feet. These hollow-boned hobgoblins weighed no more than a Thanksgiving turkey. In the older Jurassic period (130-170 million years ago) they were generally much smaller than in the Chalk Age. Digging into a desert mountain slope which once was seabottom, Dr. T. A. Stoyanow, University of Arizona geologist, laid bare a Jurassic pterosaur skeleton with a wingspread of some 28 feet, biggest specimen of that period ever found...