Pterosaurs Were Almost Too Heavy to Fly; Their Children Could Fly Since They Were Hatched

Image courtesy of Hugo Salais López, CC BY-SA 3.0.





Joel Kontinen

Pterosaurs ruled the skies at the time of the dinosaurs. Now a cache of them has been found in China.

“The extraordinary thing about those embryos is they have a set of bones that in many respects match those of adults in terms of proportions. When they come out of the egg, they are like mini-adults,” says David Unwin at the University of Leicester in the UK.

He and his colleague, Denis Charles Deeming at the University of Lincoln in the UK, analysed the size and shape of 37 eggs from a collection of 300 found at a site in Jinzhou, China. They found that as the eggs developed, they changed shape from long and slender to relatively round.

He and his colleague, Denis Charles Deeming at the University of Lincoln in the UK, analysed the size and shape of 37 eggs from a collection of 300 found at a site in Jinzhou, China. They found that as the eggs developed, they changed shape from long and slender to relatively round."

Pterosaurs were almost too heavy for evolution to cope with them. And the giraffe-sized flying creature defied Darwinian explanations. Moreover, a rapid burial of pterosaurs suggests Noah’s flood.

There is no shortage of mosaic-like creatures in the animal kingdom. The extinct ones include Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik.

Living mosaics, such as the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater, are problematic for evolution.

They are not evolving into something else, and neither did pterosaurs.

Source:

Whyte, Chelsea, 2019. Baby pterosaurs may have hatched ready to fly right out of the egg. New Scientist (12 June).