Baby pterosaurs could fly right after hatching – but crashed into storms

Baby Pterodactyls apparently flew within days of hatching – but some broke their wings in rough storms that they crashed into a lagoon where they drowned.

Very young Pterodactyls had wing structures similar to adults, with power and aerodynamic features that would enable flight. Still, paleontologists have long discussed where such hatches could actually fly.

At the Solnhofen site in southern Germany lies hundreds of pterosaur fossils encased in Lemetone. While inspecting some of them under ultraviolet light at the Museum Berger in Harthof, David Unwin and Robert Smyth, both at the University of Leicester, UK, discovered a broken wing in a Pterodactylus antiquus Hugging. Later, they chase across another little hatch with the exact same break in the other wing.

“We were shocked,” says Unwin. “And weren’t easily shocked. It’s just out of the cliff when we put the UV light on it. We both went, ‘Bloody Hell! Look at this!'”

Unwin and his colleagues estimated that the two animals – with wing buckles of only 20 centimeters and bones that were still in early growth stages – lived approx. 2 million years, for approx. 150 million years ago. At that time, the site was part of an archipelago with several islands and seawater lagoons, where occasal, serious tropical cyclones would cause fast underwater mud that caught and preserved Fauln animals.

The hats had healthy skeletons exception for a clean, angled break in Humenus – the upper arm bone, which anchors the wing – with rotation of the bone and no healing, which means the animals died right after the break. The damage is similar to typical overload damage that occurs in adults and bats flying through sea storms.

“The best explanation we have for these two poor, unlucky pterosaurs with broken arms is that they were in the air when they had their misfortune,” says Unwin.

“If we have had a very calm water surface, the chances of your little pterosaur would float and they could probably flow for a long time. But if you have these huge wave-mosted surfaces, they will really become waterproof, which is what you need for them to sink to the bottom like that.”

The results help close the long-standing debate by providing direct proof of flight in these Pterosaur ruve, the researchers say.

“I don’t even think they’re just wiping out and jumping in the air,” says Unwin. “But they are probably in the air very soon after they were born, and that is one of the reasons why we have these very young people in the fossil record today.