Flying Reptiles Had Nurturing Parental Style - New Research Finds
AncientPages.com | July 20, 2023
Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – Did the pterosaurs, flying reptiles from the days of the dinosaurs, practice parental care or not? New research by scientists from Ireland (University College Cork), China (Nanjing and Yunnan Universities), and the UK (University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London) shows that pterosaurs were indeed caring parents – but only the larger species.
This solves a long-standing conundrum. To be able to fly soon after hatching from the egg, a bird or pterosaur must have well-developed wings. Studies of smaller pterosaurs from the Jurassic showed that their babies already had large wings when they hatched, and they could have wobbled into flight within a few days of birth.
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But did this work for the later pterosaurs, which were much larger in size? In the Cretaceous, pterosaurs usually had wingspans of 5 metres, and some even reached 10–15 metres, the size of a small glider.
“This was a difficult project,” says the study leader, Dr Zixiao Yang from University College Cork (UCC). ‘We needed examples of pterosaurs where we had at least one hatchling or very young specimen as well as adults so we could study their growth rates. But baby pterosaurs are really rare.”
More:
https://www.ancientpages.com/2023/07/20/flying-reptiles-had-nurturing-parental-style/#google_vignette
