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Paleologic is back this week with an episode about Quetzalcoatlus the pterosaur. This may be marking a shift in the show as until now it talked mainly about the extinct Cenozoic animals instead, but who knows?
The animal itself was one of the last, and the largest, pterosaurs known to science, (so far). It was starred on the 2nd season of ‘Prehistoric Planet’, so it really needs no introduction.
The episode itself… did just that, as it talked about the pterosaurs in general for the first half or so. Pterosaurs were archosaurs, close evolutionary cousins both to the crocodilians, (extinct and existing), and the dinosaurs (including birds), but they were neither.
The ancestors of the pterosaurs themselves are unknown to science, at least there was no official declaration of its’ discovery by scientists, so that’s the official story. The first pterosaurs of the late Triassic and early Jurassic, (i.e. Dimorphodon) had muzzles, jaws, and teeth. By the late Jurassic, they had toothed beaks instead, (i.e. Rhamphorynchus). However, at the same time, a different model of the pterosaur emerged, such as Pterodactylus, which had toothless beaks – and short tails, and it was that model that would survive until the end of the Mesozoic, represented by Quetzalcoatlus, Pteranodon, etc.
Was the pterosaur evolution drive by the birds? Hard to say. Birds – well, avian dinosaurs - began to emerge in the late Jurassic, for a while they were no match for the pterosaurs, and they did not even try. However, during the Cretaceous in general the pterosaurs began to die-out until at last there were only the sea-going specialists such as Pteranodon and Nyctosaurus, or the semi-terrestrial carnivores and scavengers, such as Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx. The pterosaurs’ clock might have simply ran out, though there are rumors of a pterosaur-like cryptid living in Africa – the Kongomato. However, lately it seems to have fallen out of fashion, and there was never any specific evidence about what it was, or if it is even real, so there is that. The same goes for the rest of pterosaur-like cryptids, such as the Ropen – there is never any significant evidence that they are pterosaurs that survived into the modern times, or that they even exist for real at all.
The Quetzalcoatlus itself, however, was quite real, with the past tense being the key term here – it died out during the K/T extinction, and the Paleologic episode did do it justice. I have enjoyed watching it.
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