Hey guy get on google earth ok look over the whole of Asia at the giant dragon skull they live on or top left of africa thestory the woman and the dragon is that spot just above the eye if the Sahara or better yet the states find illinois ok that's where the back the head of the aztec serpant gods body starts his head stretches a to Louisiana the nose touches there the body heads east along with the wing and once it hits east coast goes up to almost Canada he's 2200 miles long the dragon on top left of africa typhon 1100 miles long and uluru is a giants heart muscle
@PaleoEdits I couldn't believe it either but I've had some crazy things happen over the years but this wow and the heal stone at stone henge is a foot the twin stone was another foot hell better yet look at devils tower in Wyoming ok it's indivdual hexagonal columns ok each one has a sack surrounds it look for the wrinkle zone at the top it's not a giant tree it's an achilies tendon from a giant and that creature I'd bet is laying there next to it cause over AZ around Wyoming and those few states u can see half a giants body right arm laying across chest other down it's side goes to waist legs are gone seems ta be and there's 2 or 3 dead creatures below that one of em u can see2 of it's legs and the underside of the head the giants body the head is turned so u can only see the chin and one partial eye I'm not even joking one bit I can't be more serious these things can't be seen from the ground u gotta be way high n the sky zoom out on google earth or maps earth is better due to being able ta take away the state edges n roads n such then u get clear pic of them
And as you can see in the graph pterosaurs were actually increasing in diversity in the Maastrichtian, possibly even reclaiming niches previously held by birds
I suppose one advantages of birds over pterosaurs were their legs could be used for wider range of actions than "just" locomation. There are fossils of birds using their elongated fingers to drag grubs from under the bark. Also ditching the flight and become fully terrestial is something pterosaurs never did, same with dedicated underwater hunter. Both things birds did multiple times including during mesozoic. Also niche of predator catching their prey in flight with talons is something pterosaurs can't exactly do while birds did it. And I dont sugest some bird superiority, just some adaptation flexibility ot of reach of first flying verbates.
Oh yeah I’m not saying birds were inferior to pterosaurs. Just they they had their own unique advantages over each other. I simply focused more heavily on the pterosaurs’ advantages cause they were more relevant to this video.
@@AncientWildTVThere's a theory that birds had an advantage over pterosaurs in niches and habitats of extreme clutter and requiring lots of maneuverability ,such as arboreal environments or insectiverous niches. This is because feathers on birds could regrow while pterosaurs' wing membranes healed very slowly or not at all after being damaged. This allowed birds to be able to fly again after bad falls or collisions very rapidly. Also birds had consistently higher predicted intelligence than pterosaurs even during the Cretaceous
Pterosaurs were already greatly endangered by the time of the cretaceous extiction event. The number of total species was lower than ever. Relics, holdouts, etc by that time
The recent findings in Morocco challenge that notion, showing more species/families made it to the end than initially thought. They also occupied a variety of niches in the Late Cretaceous, with one even being an apex predator.
Imagine their raw strength they had in those legs and wings to jump start and fly... I bet they could one kick or smack smaller dinosaurs to death... And uff... amount of oxygen they had to inhale and process to energize those muscles. I wonder if they had problems similar to Hummingbird that have really amazing ways to oxidize sugars instantly, too keep flying and moving but could get syggar crash and have weird diet, or they were more like lazy fatty that can move fast and be strong for few seconds and then give up on moving.
Their forelimbs were indeed very strong. Not sure how well-suited pterosaurs in general were for muscle-on-muscle combat, but Hatzegopteryx in particular seemed to be built much more powerfully than any other.
do you think the differences in their diet and energy management would have influenced their behavior and survival strategies in a prehistoric ecosystem?
Great video! Even as someone who prides himself on not falling in the "progressive replacement by superior species" misconception of evolution, I've just presumed the idea birds outcompeted small pterosaurs as given, which now sounds ridiculous in hindsight. Seeing as this is one narrative around Lisowicia, maybe its existence should rather be taken as potential evidence even less colossal dicynodonts could have still been around by the end of the Triassic. This is a really exciting time to be alive for palaeontology.
Wow, your narrative is really compelling, though of course I'm not an expert. And I personally appreciate the warmth of your talking, as well as the writing. Thank you for your work!
This has always been a rather odd take to me. What kind of birds would compete for the same type of prey as a giraffe-sized murder-stork? Sure, one could argue that birds began to diversify at the same time Pterosaurs declined, but if anything that just further reinforces the idea of the birds being unable to directly compete with them. Even as a kid watching Walking with Dinosaurs, I was still more confused about how people came to this conclusion more then anything. Oh, and your birds are very cute. Thanks for sharing.
Aside from the niches of large flying animals, birds and pterosaurs overlapped in diet and lifestyle. Since pterosaurs are able to be much larger than birds while still being able to fly well. Small pterosaurs like anurognathids ate flying insects, like swallows do. Tapejarids ate fruits and seeds. Lots of marine pterosaurs like pteranodon and tropeognathus just ate fish and soared above the oceans. Some pterosaurs were small generalists that picked up random food from the ground and trees, like kunpengopteryx. Sure, birds could never compete for the niches of giant pterosaurs, but birds and pterosaurs still largely overlapped in general niche. Like how birds and bats do today
Great video! I love the surge of pterosaur-esque/wyvern type dragons in media. Not because of the whole number of limbs issue but because of the biomechanics! Using the same muscles for walking, take-off, and flight just make more sense! Birds make their system work, but at enormous cost! Look at the largest birds vs the largest pterosaurs or the number of birds that have lost flight (granted, we have no fossils of flightless pterosaurs which could be sample bias, incomplete sampling, OR a lack of examples, so we really can't use that end for comparison)
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if flightless pterosaurs weren't a thing (or at least, were considerably less prevalent than flightless birds) given pterosaurs didn't have to deal with the significant trade-off between terrestrial/aerial locomotion that birds do.
@@BugsandBiology They almost certainly were a thing, but flightlessness in birds was largely asscoiated with island ecologies which are few and far between. So, the likelihood of finding a fossil is incredibly low
So, to be clear, was the birds being kleptoparasites of Pterosaurs theory only based on the "faster takeoff and maneuverability" argument or do we have fossils of birds we think did engage in kleptoparasitism? If there were bird kleptoparasites, what types of food sources would have been affected by this behavior if any.
@@AncientWildTV Well there is always more fish in the sea as they say. So, I don't see how that could have negativity affected Pterosaur populations. 🤔🤔
I like the hypothesis that pterosaurs were outcompeted by themselves, with juvenile azhdarchids being able to outcompete smaller pterosaurs. Not sure how valid this hypothesis is, however.
Brilliant vid! I can remember even when I was a kid in the 90s and being the animal obsessed daughter of a whole family of engineers, they just didn’t make sense biomechanically. Swans are one of the few if bad comparisons I could make at the time, decent size and quite restricted with take off/landings but they are evolved to bob upside down in lakes and pterosaurs clearly weren’t 😅 I loved the walking with dinosaurs depiction but the restrictions on where they could live just made them seem like a very vulnerable meal and with few exceptions that’s not a winning evolutionary strategy! I have been wondering for a while if at some point evidence of more ocean going pterosaurs will appear (or maybe I’ve just missed it) not just albatross lifestyle but able to settle at sea or dive like gannets. I can see problems with this but at the same time them slingshotting themselves airborne from a standing start and running at speed was thought impossible. Edit: and I can see you have a depiction of gannet pterosaurs 😆 Also love the macaw side eye on your shoulder 😁 never trust a parrot with glasses!
The giant Azhdarchids were some of the most terrifying animals to ever live in my opinion. On the flip side, part of me wonders if some small pterosaurs may have been good pets…
@@BugsandBiology The thing with giant azhdarchids that they were large predators the size of tigers but able to fly. That plus their surreal proportions ups the fear factor for a lot of people.
The subject matter of this video is fascinating and presented in such a wonderful way. I think your writing in particular is superb as for me it strikes the right balance between the epic, poetic, and lofty, as well as the simple, effective communication of the topic. I admire all those who stand as unabashed champions of the criminally underrated and mighty pterosaur lineage. It's also great to see a fellow Aussie doing it.
I almost never feel compelled to comment on videos but seriously I needed to let everybody know how I felt about this video, awesome stuff keep it up mate 😊
re Pterosaurs getting a bad deal in paleo-art - I think a lot of this is down to their being continually described as "flying reptiles". You might as well describe mammals as "walking fish" - but most people would consider this ridiculous as fish are cold blooded, scaly and swim in water whereas mammals do descend from fish but are warm blooded, hairy and wander around on land but - hold-on - reptiles are cold blooded, scaly and wander around on land whilst pterosaurs were warm-blooded (not quite certain but well-accepted), covered in pycnofibres and flew in the air. After a chat with GPT it seems that the period between Pterosaurs splitting off from Archosaurs until the K-Pg boundary is about the same amount of time as from the first Amphibian (e.g. last ancestral Fish) to the first Mammal - about 170 million years, so I think it is valid to maintain that the last Pterosaurs were no more reptiles than were the first Mammals fish. I think "Marine Reptiles" suffer from the same branding problem but the word Sauropterygian is a bit of a mouthful :-( Unfortunately I think the "Reptile" branding holds back peoples' imagination. I like to think of Pterosaurs as being more like a bird or a bat than a reptile and similarly marine reptiles as alternative Cetaceans and Pinnipeds.
Yeah, it makes me kinda sad. I've always preferred pterosaurs over dinosaurs, but I'm like, the only one? Something about flight makes me feel wonderous. Just imagine being a creature able to soar through the winds, above all that's below. It's so sad they're only considered reptiles, they're basically their own thing. There was nothing else like them. Which is sad, because most were social animals, just like birds, which then got wiped out. Imagine the life of the last pterosaur. A smart, social creature, but there's nobody else, not in the entire world who is like you. Not only the last of your species, but the entirety of your kind. Poor guy was probably the loneliest creature in the history of earth. Many animal orders (or whatever its called) have gone extinct, but were any of them as smart as a pterosaur? Flight requires intelligence, and so does being social. I wanna shine light onto these awesome animals, they deserve better. I'm an artist, an aspiring animator, and I'm working on an independently made animated film. It'll take forever to get done, but someday, yall will see it. It's going to revolve around the prehistoric times, and the mc will be some kind of pterosaur. Although it will have mixes of fantasy, I want to make sure I make the creatures and their behaviors somewhat accurate. No more t rex the dino king, make way for the ptero king lol. I'm giving these guys some love.
Even Dinosaurs weren’t like modern reptiles in a conventional sense (different anatomy, varying between warm and cold blood, some having feathers, etc.) part of it is just a product of having a compartmentilized education and many not going on beyond that.
@@Ratty524 agreed - but I think there is a better understanding now that dinosaurs had come on a long way from reptiles - e.g. therapods are treated as being much closer to birds than reptiles ...
Doesn’t help that the word “reptile” tends to have fairly negative connotations (being dumb, sluggish and emotionless), in spite of the fact that many can be quite intelligent and charismatic.
yes i think that your channel is very appealing and amazing you can learn things from it , for instance i did not know that many people think that birds litterally killed pterosaurus but this theory is not a good theory. I LOVE YOU , I LOVE YOUR TH-cam CHANNEL , YOU ARE AMAZING I LOVED YOUR VIDEO ABOUT Monster Bug Wars. Lol the bull cricket.
9:46 I find it kinda interesting that some groups of prehistoric animals didn't really have the same limitations that modern groups have. Obviously, this is one example, but there's another really interesting one I can think of that, in an interview with Matt Bille, Russell Engelman said that arthrodires may have been less picky about salinity than cartilaginous fish.
"Birds are dinosaurs" doesn't mean t-rexes evolved into chickens, it means the dinosaurs recognizable as modern birds were the dinosaurs that survived.
@@katherinekoza6536 Are you saying you thought birds are descended from pterosaurs? LOL 🤣 Pterosaurs becoming birds wouldn't make any sense biomechanically. Pterosaurs were quadrupedal, which lets them use their strong forelimbs to support their weight on the ground. This allowed them to have very weak, light hind limbs. Birds are bipedal, which means their hind limbs need to have the muscles to support their weight. Muscle is heavy. Having to carry the weight of your wings while walking makes you carry extra weight, as they aren't even helping you walk. Having strong enough hind legs to walk bipedally means you have to carry extra weight when flying. Pterosaurs get the best of both worlds, since their forelimbs carried most of their weight when walking. And they didn't have to carry heavy hind legs when flying. While birds have to carry lots of extra weight whether they fly or walk. This is the reason why pterosaurs were able to get much larger than birds, but still fly and walk properly.
"So, it turns out pterosaurs and birds weren’t exactly throwing elbows in some prehistoric aerial showdown! Birds may have had some flight upgrades, but the asteroid had the final word. Imagine soaring the skies with these two wildly different flyers-one covered in feathers, the other looking like a flying reptilian dragon. Loved the way this video broke it all down with a perfect mix of science and humor. Who knew the real competition was just Mother Nature's plot twist at the end?"
@@righthandstep5 Pterosaurs were much more efficient at flying and walking than birds. Since they used their strong wings to walk and didn't need to carry extra weight when walking. Unlike birds, which have to carry their wings when walking. And they didn't carry extra weight when flying, since they have super light hind limbs, due to using their forelimbs to walk. While bird legs have to be strong enough to carry their entire body. Muscle is heavy and bipedalism severely limits the size of flying birds. And Pterosaurs could fly as babies, not needing to sit in a nest. The only reason pterosaurs went extinct is because they got too successful, with pterosaurs growing to larger sizes and having their babies fill niches of small fliers. Most birds also died to the asteroid. Including all the toothed birds, but a few tiny, toothless birds that ate seeds and insects survived, while pterosaurs died due to none of them being as small as the smallest adult birds.
Pterosaurs were outcompeted by birds the same way wolves were "outcompeted" by early humans. As in, minor ecological overlap and millions of years of co-existence. (Now might be a good time to point out that pterosaurs and birds, or at least the first avialans theorized to have been potentially capable of powered flight, have co-existed for a longer period of time than pterosaurs have spent extinct; ~83 million years vs 66 million years).
The more I learn about prehistoric life and evolution in general, the more I'm inclined to believe that the thing that pulls the strings the most whenever or not species survive is down to dumb old luck in the environment in question rather than survival of the fittest.
I’m so jealous of all the birds in this video. That pink cockatoo is just adorable. And I definitely agree with the thesis of this video. Evolution isn’t by any means a way of achieving perfection. It’s a messy and cumbersome process and temporal separation isn’t an good indication in the slightest of biological superiority. Also how much of a flex is it that archosaurs have the 2 out of 3 vertebrate fliers?
So how adapted were pterosaurs to colder climates. i would assume that birds have an advantage there over the pterosaur, with it's wing membrane that is only covered with a thin layer of fur. I would assume that birds are much better able to survive in colder climates and started to thrive there first.
All good points, particularly the restriction on overall size imposed by the leg muscles of birds (avian theropod dinosaurs). However, their well-muscled bipedal legs gave them an advantage on the ground and in the water. There was no pterosaurian equivalent of the ostrich or the cormorant. That advantage allows the birds to dominate even today. For every extant mammalian species, there are two or three bird species.
There was actually a diving pterosaur: Alcione. Also, you’re wrong that pterosaurs were poor walkers and runners on the ground, as plenty of them actually were adapted for terrestrial locomotion to the point of sacrificing some flight capability (though none became flightless). ESPECIALLY the azhdarchid and related pterosaurs that were the main lineage of pterosaurs during the Late Cretaceous, which were all excellent runners and walkers with somewhat short wings for their body size and a mammal-like quadrupedal gait.
@@bkjeong4302 Alcione elanius was NOT a diving pterosaur. That is one interpretation of its relatively short wing span. Other researchers compare Alcione to modern shore birds such as plovers and sandpipers who use their short wings to forage for mollusks and crustaceans in the active coastal zone. If not for the plover's ability to rapidly take to the air an incoming wave could easily drown the bird. Alcione could have lived a similar lifestyle. There are many problems with the driving hypothesis. The first is the problem of wing rigidity. Penguins can propel themselves underwater with wingbeats. However, to acquire the needed wing rigidity, they have evolved wings far too short to support flight. Furthermore, a cormorant is not biomechanically comparable to a diving pterosaur, assuming that a diving pterosaur existed. Cormorants rely almost entirely on their large webbed feet and powerfully muscled legs to dive and maneuver underwater, usually with their wings tightly folded against the body. (No pterosaur could fold its wings like a bird) Sometimes a cormorant will relax its wings to create drag to slow down or help it turn. Here's a video of cormorants underwater: th-cam.com/video/FyXN-cnUccw/w-d-xo.html Secondly, I DID NOT claim that pterosaurs were poor walkers. Those are your words, not mine. bkjeong4302, are you guilty of fallacious rhetoric?
@@enscroggs First of all, Alcione likely belongs to a group of pterosaurs that were genuinely adapted for a pelagic life (to the point of lacking functional front feet, only the wing finger was left), that’s not what you’d expect from a plover-like lifestyle. Second, you’re ignoring that you CAN propel yourself underwater with longer, more flexible flight-capable wings too. See shearwaters or gannets as an example of what I mean. Third, you claimed that the bipedal bauplan of birds was far more efficient for terrestrial locomotion than pterosaurs could ever be, which is based on false, outdated ideas of pterosaurs as a whole being incapable walkers when quite a few were even more at home on the ground than in the air.
Pterodactyls *are* a thing, though. They are any and all members of the genus _Pterodactylus._ Replacing misinformation with different misinformation doesn't solve the problem, it just kicks the can down the road a few paces.
Pterodactylus is a thing. Pterodactyloids are a thing. But “Pterodactyl”, especially when used as a collective term for the group as is most often the case, isn’t. Pedantic, I’ll admit.
Old depictions of medieval Dragon hunts also hint at some large Pterosaur species such as Quetzalcoatl existing up to that point. The humans of that time, seeking glory, are thus rumored to be the last factor in their total extinction. Practically ancient big game hunters.
Eh…fictional, legendary creatures bearing superficial resemblances to stuff that once existed isn’t the most compelling of evidence Especially since it’s now apparent that pterosaurs weren’t nearly as dragon-like in appearance as once thought.
@@BugsandBiology Even so, fossil distribution of that species shows it inhabited both areas. There is also the habit of humans embellishing the stories of their hunts, and especially as the story got retold by those who heard it, further skewing the public image of such creatures and even falsely claiming them to have abilities they couldn't naturally possess. Even big game hunters are known for their fish stories, and bards even more so.
And given people exaggerate (and sometimes straight up invent) stuff, supposed records about encounters with beasts that very vaguely resemble known prehistoric creatures isn’t exactly compelling evidence for anything. Plus it’s kinda implausible that giant pterosaurs would’ve survived an extra 66 million years with no fossil record whatsoever.
The dragons might also have been inspired by fossils of large creatures. Just because people only started putting dinosaurs on display in the last what three centuries doesn't mean people didn't come across them and didn't try to think of an explanation for them.
You make some good points that do weaken the "birds out-competed pterosaurs" argument. However, here's a question. In the late Cretaceous, the fossil record has a bunch of bird fossils. Birds have the same sort of flimsy bones as pterosaurs for the same reason, so are just as unlikely to fossilize. And most of the bird fossils from the period would be normal-sized birds today. IOW, not very big, so again, just as unlikely to fossilize as small or baby pterosaurs. So if there were a lot of small / baby pterosaurs around at that time IN THAT AREA, you'd think they'd have fossilized just as frequently as all the birds did. But they didn't. So I think the case is fairly strong that in that time, in that area, there were none to few pterosaurs. It seems to me the reason for this is that by the late Cretaceous, the remaining pterosaurs had been culled down almost entirely if not totally to relatively large, sometimes gigantic, eaters of marine fish and thus living only in coastal areas. They might well have been quite abundant and even somewhat diverse in these areas, but they were seemingly absent elsewhere. IOW, there was a lack of diversity in ecological roles, even if within the roles still held by pterosaurs, there were more species that we currently know of. But previously, there had been pterosaurs filling all the flying niches inland that birds now fill (except maybe seed-eaters). These types died out and birds took over although whether this was from competition or the birds just being first to refill those niches after an extinction took out those pterosaurs is an open question IMHO. Anyway, it seems to me that pterosaurs ultimately pushed their muscular advantages over birds into the open niches of being really big, long-ranged, catchers of big fish. Which, of course, like all extremist types, made them quite vulnerable to massive environmental changes. And so the last of them were killed off by the meteor.
Bird skeletons, while gracile, were not pneumatized to the same extent as those of pterosaurs. Hence, the preservation bias against pterosaurs, especially small ones, is stronger than the preservation bias against birds. Plus pterosaurs, even in the Late Cretaceous, occupied far more niches than just coastal fish-eating. Many lived inland, and showed adaptations for other lifestyles like terrestrial stalking. The end Cretaceous also saw the advent of the only known pterosaurian apex predator. Plus, the Moroccan phosphate assemblage potentially evinces an uptick in pterosaur diversity in the Late Maastrichtian. Also, while I admittedly didn’t touch on it too deeply in the video, it’s been proposed that small pterosaur species, if they were being replaced at all, were more likely replaced by juveniles of big pterosaurs than birds.
@@BugsandBiology Well, you're the scientist and I'm not, so I defer to your superior knowledge. But you're also one of the few scientists I can have a conversation with, so I'd like to go further with this. Birds might not be quite as flimsy as pterosaurs but they're at least close. And that formation in China where they find all the birds would be best-case for preserving pterosaurs. too. So you'd think that if pterosaurs had been around then and there in any numbers, we'd have found a few by now. Absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence. I mean, the only reason we take it as fact that nonavian dinosaurs died out at the KT boundary is the absence of evidence for them above that layer. Please say more about the pterosaur apex predator. I'd not heard of that. And also inland varieties of the late Cretaceous. I got a book about 15 years ago by a pterosaur specialist and he said they'd been narrowed down to the azhdarchids and similar things by the end. And yes, the babies of the giant pterosaurs likely competed with the adults of smaller species. But small critters tend to breed faster and more prolifically because they're on everybody's menu. Seems strange that baby giants could keep up.
The thing is, even when we know that small pterosaurs must have been around in some numbers (in the form of babies/juveniles), they are almost entirely absent in the fossil record. That's evidence for a strong preservation bias against small pterosaurs, which would have also affected small pterosaur species as well. The pterosaur apex predator was Hatzegopteryx thambema, a giant Azhdarchid from the Late Cretaceous with considerably more robust anatomy than other giants like Quetzalcoatlus. It was the top predator of Hateg Island, and possibly the entirety of Europe. Azhdarchids (most of which are known from inland settings) were indeed thought to have been the only pterosaurs to have made it to the end of the Cretaceous, but the fossil assemblage in the Moroccan phosphate mines showed that at least two other families - Pteranodontids and Nyctosaurids, neither of which were that similar to Azhdarchids, had made it all the way to the end.
Aside from everything else you’re completely ignoring that most Late Cretaceous pterosaurs WEREN’T long-ranged oceangoing piscivores restricted to coastal areas, but terrestrial and found mostly in inland environments (guess where azhdarchid pterosaurs lived?) Your entire argument is based on assuming the exact opposite of reality. This is especially true for the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs you argue evolved as dedicated piscivores to avoid competition with birds, as none of them lived in marine environments and as they were terrestrial predators of small (and in one case somewhat larger) prey, as Bugs and Biology mentioned). They weren’t being forced out to sea because of competition with birds at all, but heading inland. You’re literally saying that animals that were found in terrestrial environments and eating land animals had been forced to evolve as marine animals only found in coastal or marine environments.
@@bkjeong4302 Actually,, the really big azhdarchid from Texas was pretty much on the coast at the time, due to the seaway through the middle of North America. But like I said, I got my opinions from a 2005 book by David M. Unwin, who was one of the leading authorities on pterosaurs at the time. His book espoused the idea that birds out-competed pterosaurs and that big fish-eaters were all that was left by the end. Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago. I've not kept up on developments since. I'm just saying that a respected expert informed my position. If you say things were different and that much better info is now available, please point me at some good, newer books on the subject. Thanks.
So in the end dinosaur out competed each every archasaur, there are only one family of psuedsuchia, pterasaur are extinct and dinosaur has takem over skies land and water only competitor being mammals
Well not really. The evidence dinosaurs (birds) were outcompeting pterosaurs is dubious at best, and nor did they outcompete pseudosuchians either - it was the end-Triassic extinction that opened things up and provided an opportunity for dinosaurs to radiate/diversify.
@@BugsandBiology i am talking about period after KFG extinction to modern era, triassic was definitely dominated by psuedosuchians even until the late cretaceous there were lot of variety, but now we only have crocodile morphs, such as alligator,crocs and caimne etc. who are more or less falls in same group and are adapted for same niche, and i saw somewhere there was some psuedosuchians variation even after KFG but they were not that successful
@@jack76thegamer30 The Cenozoic landcrocs fell to climatic causes (and in the case of the last terrestrial mekosuchines, to humans), not to mammalian or dinosaurian competition.
Your recreations share a well-nigh universal fault: reconstructing pterosaur wings on the outline of birds'. For any flying creature, it is crucial that the center of lift be identical with or slightly forward of the center of mass. But pterosaurs had non-retractable necks and relatively larger heads than birds (and that's BEFORE that insane Cretaceous headgear) Pterosaur wings would have needed to be greatly swept forward: something that can be seen in today's man-o-war bird, with its long heavy beak and almost vestigial hind limbs. And curiously, updrafts pushing a swept-forward wing back serves the same kind of automatic side stabilization which in birds is accomplished by airflow around the rear edges of outer wing feathers. Azhdarchids had enormously large heads and long necks: and their greatly elongated wristbones, usually considered an adaptation to stork-like hunting, would also have served to sweep their wings forward even more and keep the center of lift in proper relation to the center of mass. A published paper has been written on this but although I have read it thoroughly I can neither recall nor find again the author's name.
My reconstitutions? My only reconstruction was the standing Tropeognathus on the thumbnail - all the other reconstitutions used were by other paleoartists who are credited fairly obviously on screen.
@@BugsandBiology Of course, but they're "yours" in the sense that you used them. Not that there's a lot of alternatives. Wish I were better at art, I might try some myself. But who put the 'dac' in the pterodactyloid, who put the 'rham' in the rhamalhamphorhynchus?
Ive seen the opposite sentiment that birds were insignificant animals during the Mesozoic who were poor fliers, needing to use trees to take off and livingunder the shadow of pterosaurs, and only beginning to reach their full flight potential after the former webt extinct. In reality, birds were already very good fliers in terms of speed, lift and maneuverability by 120mya, far before the K-PG extinction. The only niche they hadnt taken was giant soarers due to the body limitations mentioned. The k-pg extinction was actually a very devastating thing for birds, and almost completely wiped out the incredible diversity they had during the Cretaceous. Had the extinction not happened, birds would continue to be adept fliers.
Oh my, the Bugs & Biology budget has reached a new level: filling the sky with cutting-edge CG pterosaurs!
But no face spider 😔
Hey guy get on google earth ok look over the whole of Asia at the giant dragon skull they live on or top left of africa thestory the woman and the dragon is that spot just above the eye if the Sahara or better yet the states find illinois ok that's where the back the head of the aztec serpant gods body starts his head stretches a to Louisiana the nose touches there the body heads east along with the wing and once it hits east coast goes up to almost Canada he's 2200 miles long the dragon on top left of africa typhon 1100 miles long and uluru is a giants heart muscle
@@ericbeeman8717 What in the name of everything that's sacred and holy have you been smoking?
@PaleoEdits it's there I'm telling u no joke man if u don't believe me I'll send u pics of this shit it's crazy but ya it'd all there
@PaleoEdits I couldn't believe it either but I've had some crazy things happen over the years but this wow and the heal stone at stone henge is a foot the twin stone was another foot hell better yet look at devils tower in Wyoming ok it's indivdual hexagonal columns ok each one has a sack surrounds it look for the wrinkle zone at the top it's not a giant tree it's an achilies tendon from a giant and that creature I'd bet is laying there next to it cause over AZ around Wyoming and those few states u can see half a giants body right arm laying across chest other down it's side goes to waist legs are gone seems ta be and there's 2 or 3 dead creatures below that one of em u can see2 of it's legs and the underside of the head the giants body the head is turned so u can only see the chin and one partial eye I'm not even joking one bit I can't be more serious these things can't be seen from the ground u gotta be way high n the sky zoom out on google earth or maps earth is better due to being able ta take away the state edges n roads n such then u get clear pic of them
And as you can see in the graph pterosaurs were actually increasing in diversity in the Maastrichtian, possibly even reclaiming niches previously held by birds
Yeah that’s what one of the studies I looked at was saying too. Definitely bucks the previously established trend.
@@BugsandBiologyHow is your Wednesday do you 😢St.Jude Hospital?
I suppose one advantages of birds over pterosaurs were their legs could be used for wider range of actions than "just" locomation. There are fossils of birds using their elongated fingers to drag grubs from under the bark. Also ditching the flight and become fully terrestial is something pterosaurs never did, same with dedicated underwater hunter. Both things birds did multiple times including during mesozoic. Also niche of predator catching their prey in flight with talons is something pterosaurs can't exactly do while birds did it.
And I dont sugest some bird superiority, just some adaptation flexibility ot of reach of first flying verbates.
Oh yeah I’m not saying birds were inferior to pterosaurs. Just they they had their own unique advantages over each other.
I simply focused more heavily on the pterosaurs’ advantages cause they were more relevant to this video.
How do you think the evolutionary paths of birds and pterosaurs influenced their ecological roles during the Mesozoic?
@@AncientWildTVThere's a theory that birds had an advantage over pterosaurs in niches and habitats of extreme clutter and requiring lots of maneuverability ,such as arboreal environments or insectiverous niches. This is because feathers on birds could regrow while pterosaurs' wing membranes healed very slowly or not at all after being damaged. This allowed birds to be able to fly again after bad falls or collisions very rapidly. Also birds had consistently higher predicted intelligence than pterosaurs even during the Cretaceous
@@TheAnticlinton thats interesting. this cognitive edge could further differentiate them from pterosaurs in competitive niches.
Sadly this is quite possibly the most pervasive outcompetition myth after the Dinosaurs vs. Pseudosuchians and Carnivora vs. everything else.
“Mammal better!!!!!” Is probably the one that annoys me the most.
Pterosaurs were already greatly endangered by the time of the cretaceous extiction event. The number of total species was lower than ever. Relics, holdouts, etc by that time
The recent findings in Morocco challenge that notion, showing more species/families made it to the end than initially thought. They also occupied a variety of niches in the Late Cretaceous, with one even being an apex predator.
@@BugsandBiology in regards to placental mammals especially... south america comes to mind
A video about that, namely the whole terror bird thing, is something I plan on making.
The flipping the bird to the bird was hilarious😂
I flipped off a bird, and I flipped off a plane.
All that was left was to flip off Superman…
Imagine their raw strength they had in those legs and wings to jump start and fly... I bet they could one kick or smack smaller dinosaurs to death... And uff... amount of oxygen they had to inhale and process to energize those muscles. I wonder if they had problems similar to Hummingbird that have really amazing ways to oxidize sugars instantly, too keep flying and moving but could get syggar crash and have weird diet, or they were more like lazy fatty that can move fast and be strong for few seconds and then give up on moving.
Their forelimbs were indeed very strong. Not sure how well-suited pterosaurs in general were for muscle-on-muscle combat, but Hatzegopteryx in particular seemed to be built much more powerfully than any other.
do you think the differences in their diet and energy management would have influenced their behavior and survival strategies in a prehistoric ecosystem?
An excellent, factual explanation, which is logical…
P.S. Maybe your nickname should be “Cockatoo Whisperer”!
Thanks Ambrose!
Reckon “cockatoo whisperer” might be an undue title given the whole middle finger situation haha
@@BugsandBiology 🤣
Another great video. i really like this channel. Keep it coming.
Glad you enjoyed!
Great video! Even as someone who prides himself on not falling in the "progressive replacement by superior species" misconception of evolution, I've just presumed the idea birds outcompeted small pterosaurs as given, which now sounds ridiculous in hindsight. Seeing as this is one narrative around Lisowicia, maybe its existence should rather be taken as potential evidence even less colossal dicynodonts could have still been around by the end of the Triassic. This is a really exciting time to be alive for palaeontology.
Really good video! A lot I didn't know before!
Thanks!
Wow, your narrative is really compelling, though of course I'm not an expert. And I personally appreciate the warmth of your talking, as well as the writing. Thank you for your work!
Great video! Finally some justice for pterosaurs!
Thanks! I think out of all the major, “mainstream” groups of prehistoric animals, pterosaurs have been shafted by media more than any other.
New to the channel, very much so enjoyed the video. Both topic and presentation are great and I look forward to more of your videos
Thanks! I'll certainly keep them coming!
This has always been a rather odd take to me. What kind of birds would compete for the same type of prey as a giraffe-sized murder-stork? Sure, one could argue that birds began to diversify at the same time Pterosaurs declined, but if anything that just further reinforces the idea of the birds being unable to directly compete with them. Even as a kid watching Walking with Dinosaurs, I was still more confused about how people came to this conclusion more then anything.
Oh, and your birds are very cute. Thanks for sharing.
Aside from the niches of large flying animals, birds and pterosaurs overlapped in diet and lifestyle. Since pterosaurs are able to be much larger than birds while still being able to fly well. Small pterosaurs like anurognathids ate flying insects, like swallows do. Tapejarids ate fruits and seeds. Lots of marine pterosaurs like pteranodon and tropeognathus just ate fish and soared above the oceans. Some pterosaurs were small generalists that picked up random food from the ground and trees, like kunpengopteryx. Sure, birds could never compete for the niches of giant pterosaurs, but birds and pterosaurs still largely overlapped in general niche. Like how birds and bats do today
Great and very appreciated video!
Thanks!
Great video! I love the surge of pterosaur-esque/wyvern type dragons in media. Not because of the whole number of limbs issue but because of the biomechanics! Using the same muscles for walking, take-off, and flight just make more sense!
Birds make their system work, but at enormous cost! Look at the largest birds vs the largest pterosaurs or the number of birds that have lost flight (granted, we have no fossils of flightless pterosaurs which could be sample bias, incomplete sampling, OR a lack of examples, so we really can't use that end for comparison)
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if flightless pterosaurs weren't a thing (or at least, were considerably less prevalent than flightless birds) given pterosaurs didn't have to deal with the significant trade-off between terrestrial/aerial locomotion that birds do.
@@BugsandBiology They almost certainly were a thing, but flightlessness in birds was largely asscoiated with island ecologies which are few and far between. So, the likelihood of finding a fossil is incredibly low
Peak video after peak video, keep it up!
Thanks! Definitely opting for a quality over quantity approach lately
Thank you for the video!
So, to be clear, was the birds being kleptoparasites of Pterosaurs theory only based on the "faster takeoff and maneuverability" argument or do we have fossils of birds we think did engage in kleptoparasitism? If there were bird kleptoparasites, what types of food sources would have been affected by this behavior if any.
imo if there were bird kleptoparasites, they likely targeted food sources that pterosaurs caught, like fish or smaller prey
@@AncientWildTV Well there is always more fish in the sea as they say. So, I don't see how that could have negativity affected Pterosaur populations. 🤔🤔
Well you certainly flipped the bird and pterosaur.
I like the hypothesis that pterosaurs were outcompeted by themselves, with juvenile azhdarchids being able to outcompete smaller pterosaurs. Not sure how valid this hypothesis is, however.
Brilliant vid!
I can remember even when I was a kid in the 90s and being the animal obsessed daughter of a whole family of engineers, they just didn’t make sense biomechanically. Swans are one of the few if bad comparisons I could make at the time, decent size and quite restricted with take off/landings but they are evolved to bob upside down in lakes and pterosaurs clearly weren’t 😅
I loved the walking with dinosaurs depiction but the restrictions on where they could live just made them seem like a very vulnerable meal and with few exceptions that’s not a winning evolutionary strategy!
I have been wondering for a while if at some point evidence of more ocean going pterosaurs will appear (or maybe I’ve just missed it) not just albatross lifestyle but able to settle at sea or dive like gannets. I can see problems with this but at the same time them slingshotting themselves airborne from a standing start and running at speed was thought impossible.
Edit: and I can see you have a depiction of gannet pterosaurs 😆
Also love the macaw side eye on your shoulder 😁 never trust a parrot with glasses!
So bummed I don't get to see the wacky creatures from millions of years ago. but then again I don't care for being eaten by giant birds
The giant Azhdarchids were some of the most terrifying animals to ever live in my opinion.
On the flip side, part of me wonders if some small pterosaurs may have been good pets…
@@BugsandBiology
The thing with giant azhdarchids that they were large predators the size of tigers but able to fly. That plus their surreal proportions ups the fear factor for a lot of people.
The subject matter of this video is fascinating and presented in such a wonderful way. I think your writing in particular is superb as for me it strikes the right balance between the epic, poetic, and lofty, as well as the simple, effective communication of the topic. I admire all those who stand as unabashed champions of the criminally underrated and mighty pterosaur lineage. It's also great to see a fellow Aussie doing it.
Thanks a lot! I’ve always enjoyed writing, and it’s super fun to apply that to a TH-cam format.
And yeah, pterosaurs are insanely underrated!
I almost never feel compelled to comment on videos but seriously I needed to let everybody know how I felt about this video, awesome stuff keep it up mate 😊
re Pterosaurs getting a bad deal in paleo-art - I think a lot of this is down to their being continually described as "flying reptiles". You might as well describe mammals as "walking fish" - but most people would consider this ridiculous as fish are cold blooded, scaly and swim in water whereas mammals do descend from fish but are warm blooded, hairy and wander around on land but - hold-on - reptiles are cold blooded, scaly and wander around on land whilst pterosaurs were warm-blooded (not quite certain but well-accepted), covered in pycnofibres and flew in the air. After a chat with GPT it seems that the period between Pterosaurs splitting off from Archosaurs until the K-Pg boundary is about the same amount of time as from the first Amphibian (e.g. last ancestral Fish) to the first Mammal - about 170 million years, so I think it is valid to maintain that the last Pterosaurs were no more reptiles than were the first Mammals fish. I think "Marine Reptiles" suffer from the same branding problem but the word Sauropterygian is a bit of a mouthful :-( Unfortunately I think the "Reptile" branding holds back peoples' imagination. I like to think of Pterosaurs as being more like a bird or a bat than a reptile and similarly marine reptiles as alternative Cetaceans and Pinnipeds.
Yeah, it makes me kinda sad. I've always preferred pterosaurs over dinosaurs, but I'm like, the only one? Something about flight makes me feel wonderous. Just imagine being a creature able to soar through the winds, above all that's below.
It's so sad they're only considered reptiles, they're basically their own thing. There was nothing else like them. Which is sad, because most were social animals, just like birds, which then got wiped out. Imagine the life of the last pterosaur. A smart, social creature, but there's nobody else, not in the entire world who is like you. Not only the last of your species, but the entirety of your kind. Poor guy was probably the loneliest creature in the history of earth. Many animal orders (or whatever its called) have gone extinct, but were any of them as smart as a pterosaur? Flight requires intelligence, and so does being social.
I wanna shine light onto these awesome animals, they deserve better. I'm an artist, an aspiring animator, and I'm working on an independently made animated film. It'll take forever to get done, but someday, yall will see it. It's going to revolve around the prehistoric times, and the mc will be some kind of pterosaur. Although it will have mixes of fantasy, I want to make sure I make the creatures and their behaviors somewhat accurate. No more t rex the dino king, make way for the ptero king lol. I'm giving these guys some love.
Even Dinosaurs weren’t like modern reptiles in a conventional sense (different anatomy, varying between warm and cold blood, some having feathers, etc.) part of it is just a product of having a compartmentilized education and many not going on beyond that.
@@Ratty524 agreed - but I think there is a better understanding now that dinosaurs had come on a long way from reptiles - e.g. therapods are treated as being much closer to birds than reptiles ...
A big part of that is because people have a false view of reptiles as “less evolved” and “dumb and instinctive”.
Doesn’t help that the word “reptile” tends to have fairly negative connotations (being dumb, sluggish and emotionless), in spite of the fact that many can be quite intelligent and charismatic.
yes i think that your channel is very appealing and amazing you can learn things from it , for instance i did not know that many people think that birds litterally killed pterosaurus but this theory is not a good theory. I LOVE YOU , I LOVE YOUR TH-cam CHANNEL , YOU ARE AMAZING I LOVED YOUR VIDEO ABOUT Monster Bug Wars. Lol the bull cricket.
You in New Caledonia? that looks like natural Cook pine growth!
Nah that’s Enoggera Reservoir in Brisbane. Those trees in the background are Araucaria cunninghamii - hoop pines.
9:46 I find it kinda interesting that some groups of prehistoric animals didn't really have the same limitations that modern groups have. Obviously, this is one example, but there's another really interesting one I can think of that, in an interview with Matt Bille, Russell Engelman said that arthrodires may have been less picky about salinity than cartilaginous fish.
Really goes to show that evolutionary history isn't a linear trend of animals getting "better" over time.
@@BugsandBiology Exactly
0:12 Hell yeah!! Pterosaurs got to be some of the most unique beasts I know of!
As far as vertebrates go, I think pterosaurs have got to be strong contenders for the title of the weirdest to ever evolve
@BugsandBiology At least that we know of.
"Hatzegopteryx, the coolest animal ever" and it's known from like 3 broken bones 😅😅
Q ,if Pterosaurs were around ,at the same time as birds , then where did birds originate from .?
Birds are derived dinosaurs; pterosaurs are a separate group entirely. One didn’t evolve from the other.
@@BugsandBiology Thanks Jackson for your reply .
"Birds are dinosaurs" doesn't mean t-rexes evolved into chickens, it means the dinosaurs recognizable as modern birds were the dinosaurs that survived.
@@__-be1gk yeah it’s a all birds are dinosaurs but not all dinosaurs are birds situation
@@katherinekoza6536 Are you saying you thought birds are descended from pterosaurs? LOL 🤣
Pterosaurs becoming birds wouldn't make any sense biomechanically. Pterosaurs were quadrupedal, which lets them use their strong forelimbs to support their weight on the ground. This allowed them to have very weak, light hind limbs. Birds are bipedal, which means their hind limbs need to have the muscles to support their weight. Muscle is heavy. Having to carry the weight of your wings while walking makes you carry extra weight, as they aren't even helping you walk. Having strong enough hind legs to walk bipedally means you have to carry extra weight when flying.
Pterosaurs get the best of both worlds, since their forelimbs carried most of their weight when walking. And they didn't have to carry heavy hind legs when flying. While birds have to carry lots of extra weight whether they fly or walk. This is the reason why pterosaurs were able to get much larger than birds, but still fly and walk properly.
nice vid
perfectly researchedddd
"So, it turns out pterosaurs and birds weren’t exactly throwing elbows in some prehistoric aerial showdown! Birds may have had some flight upgrades, but the asteroid had the final word. Imagine soaring the skies with these two wildly different flyers-one covered in feathers, the other looking like a flying reptilian dragon. Loved the way this video broke it all down with a perfect mix of science and humor. Who knew the real competition was just Mother Nature's plot twist at the end?"
Cheers!
Definitely don’t think pterosaurs would’ve looked like reptilian dragons though. They were fluffy and very likely warm-blooded.
@@BugsandBiology 🤯
Damn, '90s Paleo-Media got the brunt of end of the credit stick. 3:40-4:00
Just how much do we need to rate them in order to not be criminals?
Pterosaurs wiped out at K/T boundary, i.e. victims of extreme climate change like dinosaurs, not that they were inherently inferior.
I disagree
@@righthandstep5 Pterosaurs were much more efficient at flying and walking than birds. Since they used their strong wings to walk and didn't need to carry extra weight when walking. Unlike birds, which have to carry their wings when walking. And they didn't carry extra weight when flying, since they have super light hind limbs, due to using their forelimbs to walk. While bird legs have to be strong enough to carry their entire body. Muscle is heavy and bipedalism severely limits the size of flying birds. And Pterosaurs could fly as babies, not needing to sit in a nest.
The only reason pterosaurs went extinct is because they got too successful, with pterosaurs growing to larger sizes and having their babies fill niches of small fliers. Most birds also died to the asteroid. Including all the toothed birds, but a few tiny, toothless birds that ate seeds and insects survived, while pterosaurs died due to none of them being as small as the smallest adult birds.
Pterosaurs were outcompeted by birds the same way wolves were "outcompeted" by early humans.
As in, minor ecological overlap and millions of years of co-existence. (Now might be a good time to point out that pterosaurs and birds, or at least the first avialans theorized to have been potentially capable of powered flight, have co-existed for a longer period of time than pterosaurs have spent extinct; ~83 million years vs 66 million years).
Cool
The more I learn about prehistoric life and evolution in general, the more I'm inclined to believe that the thing that pulls the strings the most whenever or not species survive is down to dumb old luck in the environment in question rather than survival of the fittest.
I’m so jealous of all the birds in this video. That pink cockatoo is just adorable. And I definitely agree with the thesis of this video. Evolution isn’t by any means a way of achieving perfection. It’s a messy and cumbersome process and temporal separation isn’t an good indication in the slightest of biological superiority. Also how much of a flex is it that archosaurs have the 2 out of 3 vertebrate fliers?
That pink cockatoo made this video honestly. Its reaction to getting flipped off was perfect haha
don't birds have the same gracile anatomy and other features that would bias against preservation?
Not to the same extent as pterosaurs
They do, but not to that level.
1:29 how could you??? This is horrible!!! Truly terrible!!!! Anyway, cool video
So how adapted were pterosaurs to colder climates. i would assume that birds have an advantage there over the pterosaur, with it's wing membrane that is only covered with a thin layer of fur. I would assume that birds are much better able to survive in colder climates and started to thrive there first.
All good points, particularly the restriction on overall size imposed by the leg muscles of birds (avian theropod dinosaurs). However, their well-muscled bipedal legs gave them an advantage on the ground and in the water. There was no pterosaurian equivalent of the ostrich or the cormorant. That advantage allows the birds to dominate even today. For every extant mammalian species, there are two or three bird species.
There was actually a diving pterosaur: Alcione.
Also, you’re wrong that pterosaurs were poor walkers and runners on the ground, as plenty of them actually were adapted for terrestrial locomotion to the point of sacrificing some flight capability (though none became flightless). ESPECIALLY the azhdarchid and related pterosaurs that were the main lineage of pterosaurs during the Late Cretaceous, which were all excellent runners and walkers with somewhat short wings for their body size and a mammal-like quadrupedal gait.
@@bkjeong4302 Alcione elanius was NOT a diving pterosaur. That is one interpretation of its relatively short wing span. Other researchers compare Alcione to modern shore birds such as plovers and sandpipers who use their short wings to forage for mollusks and crustaceans in the active coastal zone. If not for the plover's ability to rapidly take to the air an incoming wave could easily drown the bird. Alcione could have lived a similar lifestyle.
There are many problems with the driving hypothesis. The first is the problem of wing rigidity. Penguins can propel themselves underwater with wingbeats. However, to acquire the needed wing rigidity, they have evolved wings far too short to support flight. Furthermore, a cormorant is not biomechanically comparable to a diving pterosaur, assuming that a diving pterosaur existed. Cormorants rely almost entirely on their large webbed feet and powerfully muscled legs to dive and maneuver underwater, usually with their wings tightly folded against the body. (No pterosaur could fold its wings like a bird) Sometimes a cormorant will relax its wings to create drag to slow down or help it turn. Here's a video of cormorants underwater: th-cam.com/video/FyXN-cnUccw/w-d-xo.html
Secondly, I DID NOT claim that pterosaurs were poor walkers. Those are your words, not mine. bkjeong4302, are you guilty of fallacious rhetoric?
@@enscroggs
First of all, Alcione likely belongs to a group of pterosaurs that were genuinely adapted for a pelagic life (to the point of lacking functional front feet, only the wing finger was left), that’s not what you’d expect from a plover-like lifestyle.
Second, you’re ignoring that you CAN propel yourself underwater with longer, more flexible flight-capable wings too. See shearwaters or gannets as an example of what I mean.
Third, you claimed that the bipedal bauplan of birds was far more efficient for terrestrial locomotion than pterosaurs could ever be, which is based on false, outdated ideas of pterosaurs as a whole being incapable walkers when quite a few were even more at home on the ground than in the air.
@@bkjeong4302 Again, you put words in my mouth. Are you a habitual liar, or is this a bad day for your mental health?
1:29 I went there just today!
Maleny bird sanctuary?
No. Like not even close!
3:47 Feathers* they're called feathers, pycnofibers are so 2010's
Well birds apparently did outcompete them at surving big rock falling from the sky.😉
Pterodactyls *are* a thing, though. They are any and all members of the genus _Pterodactylus._ Replacing misinformation with different misinformation doesn't solve the problem, it just kicks the can down the road a few paces.
Pterodactylus is a thing. Pterodactyloids are a thing. But “Pterodactyl”, especially when used as a collective term for the group as is most often the case, isn’t. Pedantic, I’ll admit.
1:28 this feels offensive somehow
Old depictions of medieval Dragon hunts also hint at some large Pterosaur species such as Quetzalcoatl existing up to that point. The humans of that time, seeking glory, are thus rumored to be the last factor in their total extinction. Practically ancient big game hunters.
Eh…fictional, legendary creatures bearing superficial resemblances to stuff that once existed isn’t the most compelling of evidence
Especially since it’s now apparent that pterosaurs weren’t nearly as dragon-like in appearance as once thought.
@@BugsandBiology Even so, fossil distribution of that species shows it inhabited both areas. There is also the habit of humans embellishing the stories of their hunts, and especially as the story got retold by those who heard it, further skewing the public image of such creatures and even falsely claiming them to have abilities they couldn't naturally possess. Even big game hunters are known for their fish stories, and bards even more so.
And given people exaggerate (and sometimes straight up invent) stuff, supposed records about encounters with beasts that very vaguely resemble known prehistoric creatures isn’t exactly compelling evidence for anything.
Plus it’s kinda implausible that giant pterosaurs would’ve survived an extra 66 million years with no fossil record whatsoever.
The dragons might also have been inspired by fossils of large creatures. Just because people only started putting dinosaurs on display in the last what three centuries doesn't mean people didn't come across them and didn't try to think of an explanation for them.
You make some good points that do weaken the "birds out-competed pterosaurs" argument. However, here's a question. In the late Cretaceous, the fossil record has a bunch of bird fossils. Birds have the same sort of flimsy bones as pterosaurs for the same reason, so are just as unlikely to fossilize. And most of the bird fossils from the period would be normal-sized birds today. IOW, not very big, so again, just as unlikely to fossilize as small or baby pterosaurs. So if there were a lot of small / baby pterosaurs around at that time IN THAT AREA, you'd think they'd have fossilized just as frequently as all the birds did. But they didn't. So I think the case is fairly strong that in that time, in that area, there were none to few pterosaurs.
It seems to me the reason for this is that by the late Cretaceous, the remaining pterosaurs had been culled down almost entirely if not totally to relatively large, sometimes gigantic, eaters of marine fish and thus living only in coastal areas. They might well have been quite abundant and even somewhat diverse in these areas, but they were seemingly absent elsewhere. IOW, there was a lack of diversity in ecological roles, even if within the roles still held by pterosaurs, there were more species that we currently know of. But previously, there had been pterosaurs filling all the flying niches inland that birds now fill (except maybe seed-eaters). These types died out and birds took over although whether this was from competition or the birds just being first to refill those niches after an extinction took out those pterosaurs is an open question IMHO.
Anyway, it seems to me that pterosaurs ultimately pushed their muscular advantages over birds into the open niches of being really big, long-ranged, catchers of big fish. Which, of course, like all extremist types, made them quite vulnerable to massive environmental changes. And so the last of them were killed off by the meteor.
Bird skeletons, while gracile, were not pneumatized to the same extent as those of pterosaurs. Hence, the preservation bias against pterosaurs, especially small ones, is stronger than the preservation bias against birds. Plus pterosaurs, even in the Late Cretaceous, occupied far more niches than just coastal fish-eating. Many lived inland, and showed adaptations for other lifestyles like terrestrial stalking. The end Cretaceous also saw the advent of the only known pterosaurian apex predator. Plus, the Moroccan phosphate assemblage potentially evinces an uptick in pterosaur diversity in the Late Maastrichtian.
Also, while I admittedly didn’t touch on it too deeply in the video, it’s been proposed that small pterosaur species, if they were being replaced at all, were more likely replaced by juveniles of big pterosaurs than birds.
@@BugsandBiology Well, you're the scientist and I'm not, so I defer to your superior knowledge. But you're also one of the few scientists I can have a conversation with, so I'd like to go further with this.
Birds might not be quite as flimsy as pterosaurs but they're at least close. And that formation in China where they find all the birds would be best-case for preserving pterosaurs. too. So you'd think that if pterosaurs had been around then and there in any numbers, we'd have found a few by now. Absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence. I mean, the only reason we take it as fact that nonavian dinosaurs died out at the KT boundary is the absence of evidence for them above that layer.
Please say more about the pterosaur apex predator. I'd not heard of that. And also inland varieties of the late Cretaceous. I got a book about 15 years ago by a pterosaur specialist and he said they'd been narrowed down to the azhdarchids and similar things by the end.
And yes, the babies of the giant pterosaurs likely competed with the adults of smaller species. But small critters tend to breed faster and more prolifically because they're on everybody's menu. Seems strange that baby giants could keep up.
The thing is, even when we know that small pterosaurs must have been around in some numbers (in the form of babies/juveniles), they are almost entirely absent in the fossil record. That's evidence for a strong preservation bias against small pterosaurs, which would have also affected small pterosaur species as well.
The pterosaur apex predator was Hatzegopteryx thambema, a giant Azhdarchid from the Late Cretaceous with considerably more robust anatomy than other giants like Quetzalcoatlus. It was the top predator of Hateg Island, and possibly the entirety of Europe.
Azhdarchids (most of which are known from inland settings) were indeed thought to have been the only pterosaurs to have made it to the end of the Cretaceous, but the fossil assemblage in the Moroccan phosphate mines showed that at least two other families - Pteranodontids and Nyctosaurids, neither of which were that similar to Azhdarchids, had made it all the way to the end.
Aside from everything else you’re completely ignoring that most Late Cretaceous pterosaurs WEREN’T long-ranged oceangoing piscivores restricted to coastal areas, but terrestrial and found mostly in inland environments (guess where azhdarchid pterosaurs lived?) Your entire argument is based on assuming the exact opposite of reality.
This is especially true for the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs you argue evolved as dedicated piscivores to avoid competition with birds, as none of them lived in marine environments and as they were terrestrial predators of small (and in one case somewhat larger) prey, as Bugs and Biology mentioned). They weren’t being forced out to sea because of competition with birds at all, but heading inland.
You’re literally saying that animals that were found in terrestrial environments and eating land animals had been forced to evolve as marine animals only found in coastal or marine environments.
@@bkjeong4302 Actually,, the really big azhdarchid from Texas was pretty much on the coast at the time, due to the seaway through the middle of North America.
But like I said, I got my opinions from a 2005 book by David M. Unwin, who was one of the leading authorities on pterosaurs at the time. His book espoused the idea that birds out-competed pterosaurs and that big fish-eaters were all that was left by the end.
Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago. I've not kept up on developments since. I'm just saying that a respected expert informed my position.
If you say things were different and that much better info is now available, please point me at some good, newer books on the subject. Thanks.
So in the end dinosaur out competed each every archasaur, there are only one family of psuedsuchia, pterasaur are extinct and dinosaur has takem over skies land and water only competitor being mammals
Well not really. The evidence dinosaurs (birds) were outcompeting pterosaurs is dubious at best, and nor did they outcompete pseudosuchians either - it was the end-Triassic extinction that opened things up and provided an opportunity for dinosaurs to radiate/diversify.
@@BugsandBiology i am talking about period after KFG extinction to modern era, triassic was definitely dominated by psuedosuchians even until the late cretaceous there were lot of variety, but now we only have crocodile morphs, such as alligator,crocs and caimne etc. who are more or less falls in same group and are adapted for same niche, and i saw somewhere there was some psuedosuchians variation even after KFG but they were not that successful
@@jack76thegamer30
The Cenozoic landcrocs fell to climatic causes (and in the case of the last terrestrial mekosuchines, to humans), not to mammalian or dinosaurian competition.
Your recreations share a well-nigh universal fault: reconstructing pterosaur wings on the outline of birds'. For any flying creature, it is crucial that the center of lift be identical with or slightly forward of the center of mass. But pterosaurs had non-retractable necks and relatively larger heads than birds (and that's BEFORE that insane Cretaceous headgear) Pterosaur wings would have needed to be greatly swept forward: something that can be seen in today's man-o-war bird, with its long heavy beak and almost vestigial hind limbs. And curiously, updrafts pushing a swept-forward wing back serves the same kind of automatic side stabilization which in birds is accomplished by airflow around the rear edges of outer wing feathers. Azhdarchids had enormously large heads and long necks: and their greatly elongated wristbones, usually considered an adaptation to stork-like hunting, would also have served to sweep their wings forward even more and keep the center of lift in proper relation to the center of mass. A published paper has been written on this but although I have read it thoroughly I can neither recall nor find again the author's name.
My reconstitutions? My only reconstruction was the standing Tropeognathus on the thumbnail - all the other reconstitutions used were by other paleoartists who are credited fairly obviously on screen.
@@BugsandBiology Of course, but they're "yours" in the sense that you used them. Not that there's a lot of alternatives. Wish I were better at art, I might try some myself. But who put the 'dac' in the pterodactyloid, who put the 'rham' in the rhamalhamphorhynchus?
Yeah unfortunately I’ve to work with what’s available when it comes to paleoart. Avoiding copyright issues narrows options further.
@@BugsandBiology The Kopyrightkoposaurus rears its ugly head!
Ive seen the opposite sentiment that birds were insignificant animals during the Mesozoic who were poor fliers, needing to use trees to take off and livingunder the shadow of pterosaurs, and only beginning to reach their full flight potential after the former webt extinct. In reality, birds were already very good fliers in terms of speed, lift and maneuverability by 120mya, far before the K-PG extinction. The only niche they hadnt taken was giant soarers due to the body limitations mentioned. The k-pg extinction was actually a very devastating thing for birds, and almost completely wiped out the incredible diversity they had during the Cretaceous. Had the extinction not happened, birds would continue to be adept fliers.
:)