Daily Dino Fact: Giraffe bird?
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Hatzegotpteryx like WHOA
Q: Who’s the biggest flyer? – Gorgey
A: Gorgey, what a fantastic question! As we learned before, dinosaurs only walk on land so any flying or swimming reptile in the Mesozoic was not a dinosaur. The “flyers” were actually called pterosaurs, and they RULED the Mesozoic skies. Flying animals were not common during this era, and they pretty much dominated the air. Evidence has also shown that these creatures most likely were very skilled at walking on ground.
What I didn’t realize before researching this question is how stinkin’ big some pterosaurs became! Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx were the two biggest pterosaurs of them all, and they lived during the Cretaceous up until the end. These two had wingspans of 40ft (12m) or more and were about the size of a giraffe. The biggest bird today is the Wandering Albatross, which has a wingspan of 12ft (3.7m). I can’t imagine what it would be like to see one of these monsters cruising through the sky.
The scary part is that paleontologists acknowledge that the fossil record of pterosaurs isn’t near complete, and it is possible that a fossil of a larger pterosaur exists somewhere in the earth… eep!
-Rex
