pterosaur
翼龙
Definitions
- 1
- : any flying reptile of the extinct order Pterosauria, from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, having the outside digit of the forelimb greatly elongated and supporting a wing membrane.
Examples
The pterosaur specimen, however, was definitely not perfect.
In 2013, a police raid at Santos Harbor in Brazil recovered about 30,000 smuggled fossils, including the most intact specimen of a type of big-headed pterosaur ever found.
A new analysis of the fossilized wing bones of embryonic, newly hatched and adult pterosaurs suggests the baby creatures were strong and nimble fliers from the start, researchers report July 22 in Scientific Reports.
“Baby pterosaurs almost certainly didn’t glide,” they flew, says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not part of the new study.
Adult pterosaurs, less able to maneuver due to their size, may have then switched to more open habitats.
The last, and perhaps the most interesting, of the doomed monsters of the Mesozoic was the Pterosaur, or "flying reptile."