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This video is brought to you by FarmKind. More about them at the end of the video. The Quetzalcoatlus - one of the largest pterosaurs that ever lived - was able to… fly?! That doesn't sound right. I mean, look at this thing - it's the size of a giraffe! However, giant pterosaurs' ability to fly is really well-established in the scientific community. So how on Earth did this giant manage to fly? Hi, I'm Ever and this is MinuteEarth. 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. And compared to the biggest flying creatures alive today - the Kori bustard, or the wandering albatross, or even the Andean condor, depending on how you measure it - the Quetzalcoatlus was way, WAY bigger. 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. And while wing muscles themselves aren't preserved in the fossil record,
we know pterosaurs had huge bumps in their forelimb bones and highly modified breastbones, with ample attachment space for powerful chest muscles - just like modern flying birds do. 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 - again, 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.
Flying birds use their strong leg muscles to launch themselves into the air; that's why the bigger a bird is, the larger and more powerful its legs tend to be. 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. Once you look at all the evidence and the facts, it makes perfect sense that these giant pterosaurs could truly soar. They might look too big and wonky, but the Quetzalcoatlus was about as close as we've ever come to a flying pig. Pigs these days, of course, rarely fly. And - sorry to be a downer, especially after that uplifting video - but in a lot of places, the conditions they're kept in are heartbreaking. As someone who loves animals, I hate to see any animal suffering so much. That's why we want to help make a genuine positive change with today's sponsor, FarmKind.
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If even a fraction of this community did that, we'd transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of animals. Check out the description for more info. Thanks FarmKind.
