PTEROSAURS may have been furry rather than feathery, but perhaps they weren鈥檛 so very different from birds in other respects. A set of footprints newly unearthed in France is the first to show one of the winged reptiles coming in to land, and it suggests they did so in much the same way as modern birds.
While dinosaurs wandered the Mesozoic lands, their relatives the pterosaurs took to the skies. The flying reptiles remain something of a puzzle, and some palaeontologists even question whether the largest pterosaurs could fly at all. Now an exceptional set of footprints preserved in 150-million-year-old rock near Crayssac in south-west France offers new glimpses into pterosaur flight.
The prints were made by a small pterosaur as it was landing, according to at the University of California, Berkeley. Although most pterosaur tracks show the animals walking on all fours, the first prints in the new tracks are of the hind limbs only. Padian and his team reason that this is consistent with the incoming pterosaur 鈥渟talling鈥� as birds do, perhaps by flapping its wings, so that its body rotated to a near-vertical attitude. This would allow it to land gently on its hind feet before hopping forward on two feet and then using its 鈥渉ands鈥� to stabilise itself. Finally, the tracks suggest, it walked away on all fours (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ).
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, a palaeobiologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, says the tracks record a 鈥渟mall moment, perhaps no more than 3 seconds, in the life of a pterosaur鈥�, but still provide a valuable insight into the ancient animals. How the pterosaur launched itself into the air is still a mystery, though. 鈥淣ow we need to get to the end of this track and see if we can 鈥榮ee鈥� it take off for the skies,鈥� he adds.