Image via Getty / Warpaintcobra
For years, paleontologists, like all of us, have wondered how giant flying azhdarchid pterosaurs could carry away large prey while supporting their pencil necks at the same time. Now the mystery is solved. Go and turn no more at night.
As revealed by researchers at Portsmouth University in England, the flying reptiles, which double as the largest flying creatures to date, have necks longer than those of a giraffe. All the information in this article was preceded by the same researchers who drew CT scans of unpolluted surplus found in Morocco.
This discovery was published in iScience, accompanied by an image that the creature’s necks look like a bicycle wheel due to their spoke-like structures:
Scientists believe that the ‘lightweight’ neck formation provides power without impeding flight ability.
A professor of paleobiology at Portsmouth, dr. Dave Martill, set things out, while also having real credibility on the subject.
“It’s not like anything previously seen in a vertebra of any animal,” Martill said. ‘The neural tube is centrally located in the vertebra and is connected to the outer wall by a number of thin rod-like trabeculae, arranged radially like the spokes of a bicycle wheel and helically arranged along the length of the vertebra. They even cross over like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Evolution has transformed these creatures into amazing, breathtakingly efficient flyers. ”
Researchers intended to learn more about shapes / movements of the pterosaur neck, but the ability to examine it with a CT scan was too tempting to succeed.
Further analysis concluded that only 50 of the ‘spokes’ in the animal’s neck could increase the bending resistance by 90 percent.
The author with the best bill on the report, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PhD student Cariad Williams, put things in perspective.
“These animals have ridiculously long necks, and in some species the fifth vertebra of the head is as long as the body of the animal,” Williams said. ‘It makes a giraffe look completely normal. We wanted to know a little bit about how this incredibly long neck works, because it seems to have very little mobility between each vertebra. ‘
Pterosaurs began to take to the air at the end of the Triassic period (237 million years ago), but were removed when the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago) was wrapped by the same thing that wiped out the dinosaurs. They are also not dinosaurs (good segue) and the picture at the top is a pterodactylus, which is an extinct species of … you know what, go guess you do not care. Blame that sites have to comply with the legal stuff.
Here’s an artist’s version of everything you read to the last few sentences:
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