Word: quetzalcoatlus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
There was nothing modest about the beast named Quetzalcoatlus. This winged creature--the largest flying machine nature ever constructed--was the size of a small airplane. It was nearly 20 ft. long; its wings stretched 40 ft. across; and it boasted a toothless, 6-ft.-long beak that tapered to the width of chopsticks. What on earth, scientists have long wondered, did such a big animal...
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...