Pterosaurs Fossils Shine In the Spotlight

Pterosaurs have held the limelight of late. In the past decade or so, whole books have been written about them, such as Mark P. Witton’s Pterosaurs or David M. Unwin’s The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. More recently, Scientific American featured them with a cover story last October, and a new research article appeared in a January issue of Scientific Reports.

- JIM BRACE-THOMPSON

Although long known to paleontologists, pterosaurs (and pterodactyls) continue to surprise. They dominated the air long before birds took wing, soaring through Earth’s skies for 150 million years, then joining nonavian dinosaurs in a major extinction event 66 million years ago. As flying reptiles, they were a breed apart from dinosaurs, and they came in a fantastic and weird array of sizes and forms, from tiny finch-like creatures to monsters as big as a modern airplane!