While many one-time horror picture show portray pterosaurs as monstrous reptiles capable of plucking a human from the priming , many palaeontologists have have this slip as esthetic permit . They ’ve sustain for some time that the fly creature were more like today ’s slender and delicate cranes , catch and eating modest gnawer - sized dinosaurs . But for some pterosaur species , the old films may have been far near to thetruth .
In a raw written report , put out in the journalPeerJ , researchers argue that some of the large pterosaurs may have been far more to a great extent built than assumed , and could even have been apex predator in the ecosystems in which they lived . The paper focuses on one species , bonk asHatzegopteryx , which was a member of the azhdarchidae famliy of pterosaur , and suggests that it may have been a telluric predatory animal powerful enough to take on dwarf dinosaur that were around the size of an adult human .
The azhdarchidae contain some of the big known animals to have ever take to the sky , including the infamousQuetzalcoatlus . This mammoth beast had a 10 - meter ( 33 - metrical unit ) wingspan , lay down it one hell of a formidable creature . WhileHatzegopteryxmay not have been quite as monolithic as this , it certainly was n’t a shrinking violet and made up for it in other ways .
Focusing on a single cervix vertebra distinguish in Romania , the researcher evoke that the oversized pterosaur may well have been feeding on big target , potentially dwarf dinosaur up to the size of a human . The vertebra in question is starkly different than most others associated with flying reptile in that rather than being long and slim , it is boxy and rich .
Measuring around23 centimeters ( 9 in ) long , and about as wide , the pearl is unusual in that the wall are about three time as thick as is normal for other azhdarchidae , and would have been filled with a spongelike material that would have give it immense strength . This suggest the savage would have been passing severe and , coupled with evidence of otherHatzegopteryxfossils , would have had a massive skull that may have enable it to eat up magnanimous prey whole .
This all points towards flying reptile stalk the landscape painting not so much like cranes , but like massive maribu storks . The neighborhood where the fogey was discovered would have been an island in the Thethys Sea at the time the wildcat was alive . Despite extensive archeological site , no teeth from carnivorous dinosaurs have ever been found on the island , entail thatHatzegopteryxmay have been the rife predator – and what an ominous wolf it would have been .
