Word: quetzalcoatlus
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...cheerful. "He never drops anything/ Onto the floor./ And after he's finished,/ He asks for some more." Whichever style young readers are tempted to emulate (you get one guess), they will be entertained by Yolen's neatly rhymed text and Teague's vividly delineated dino species--protoceratops, spinosaurus, quetzalcoatlus and so on, which are all shown again on the endpapers for handy reference. And for maximum portability, the book comes with a mini-paperback duplicate that will easily fit into tiny pockets...
...more like birds, with their tails shrunken to stubs and their necks and heads greatly elongated. They lacked feathers, but their bodies were probably wrapped in a thick, furlike cloak. The range in size of pterosaurs was enormous. Some were as small and sprightly as robins, while others--like Quetzalcoatlus--were giants five times the size of a whooping crane, the largest bird in North America today...
That was one of the questions researchers tried to answer last week at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in New York City, which featured a symposium focusing on the ancient winged creatures known collectively as pterosaurs. Were flying giants such as Quetzalcoatlus carrion eaters, like outsize vultures, as researchers once proposed? Or were they--as Thomas Lehman, of Texas Tech University, and Wann Langston Jr., of the Texas Memorial Museum, convincingly argued last week--more like humongous storks, probing the lake bottoms for tasty tidbits and snaring them with their lancelike beak...
When dinosaurs ruled the earth, Quetzalcoatlus and its cousins dominated the skies. Yet ever since their fossils were first discovered in the 1700s and mistaken for strange marine creatures or bats, pterosaurs--literally, winged lizards--have remained a perplexing enigma. Did these extraordinary beasts take off by running on the ground or by dropping from a tree? Did they energetically flap their wings or deploy them as passive sails? Did they, like seabirds, nurture their young in large colonies, or did they lead a solitary life...
What did pterosaurs eat? Because pterosaur fossils and footprints have been found primarily in marine and freshwater environments, paleontologists believe many pterosaurs had tastes similar to modern sea- and shorebirds. For example, the ancient salt lakes in southwestern Texas in which Quetzalcoatlus was found contained lots of crustacean burrows but no bones from larger animals like crocodiles that might have fed a carrion eater. Some pterosaurs had beaks shaped like those of spoonbills. Pterodaustro had a mouthful of strainer-like teeth that it probably used to filter microscopic plankton from the water. Pteranodon is thought to have scooped...