Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Picture a classic Cretaceous scene. Sure, you’re a bit too late to have caught it in person, but if you’ve seen a kid’s book lately, you know the one. Broad-leafed plants cover the landscape. Triceratops graze, and velociraptors sneak around.
Above everything flaps a flock of pterosaurs, their wings spread wide and their legs akimbo.It’s a nice view. But according to a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, at least one detail is almost certainly off: Pterosaur legs simply didn’t bend that way. By pinpointing the range of motion of more contemporary animals, researchers have narrowed down how flexible these prehistoric flyers were, and weren’t.
When the first pterosaurs were found, in Bavaria in the late 1700s and early 1800s, “people thought they were reptilian bats,” says Armita Manafzadeh, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the paper’s lead author. “The first drawings of them that came out, both scientifically and to the public, were extremely bat-like.”
This image has stayed steady through the centuries, she adds: “It has permeated every aspect of our pterosaur-related lives.” Hanging museum models cast star-shaped shadows. When the winged menaces of Jurassic World start tossing the heroes into the air, they do so with their legs splayed out. Even scientific papers, she says, assume that the animals favored “this really, really extreme hip pose, where the legs are slung out all the way to the side.
”Constructing whole organisms out of the bits that have been left to us is a difficult job. With few exceptions, only the hardest tissues get fossilized, which gives an incomplete picture. “We can’t really figure out what extinct animals look like and how they moved just based on how their bones were shaped, because that’s a very small part of…
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