How can Giant Pterosaurs even fly?

Thanks to the fossil record, we know that pterosaurs had wings with elongated hand bones, just like every other flying vertebrate. But simply having wings doesn’t mean you can actually fly..

If you’re too heavy for the size of those wings – or if you can't flap them fast enough – you’ll never get anywhere. But, despite this giant pterosaur’s wingspan, scientists estimate that it was only about as heavy as a large pig.

Now with the wing-to-mass ratio looking more decent, giant pterosaurs still needed to be strong enough to flap them. So it’s reasonable to believe their wing muscles were pretty brawny. On top of that, pterosaurs had mostly hollow bones that increased the volume of their respiratory system – just like modern flying birds – which allowed them to deliver tons of oxygen to all those flight muscles! All this likely helped a Quetzalcoatlus’s big body stay aloft once it was in the air.

But getting into the air in the first place is the hardest and most energy-intensive part of flight.

Giant pterosaurs were so huge that, in order to jump into the air like birds, they would have needed truly gigantic legs that would have made them definitely too heavy to fly. So they solved the whole launching problem in a different way: they used their powerful wings for the dual purpose of taking off and flapping. And this strategy is so efficient, that bats independently evolved it as well. By the way, I think that this is my favorite fact about giant pterosaurs –and bats, of course.

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