Image via Getty / Warpaintcobra
For years, paleontologists have wondered, as we have all done, how giant flying Azhdarhid pterosaurs could carry large prey while simultaneously holding their pencil necks. Now the mystery is solved. No more throwing and returning at night.
As discovered by researchers at the University of Portsmouth in England, flying reptiles, which double as the largest flying creatures that ever existed, had a longer neck than a giraffe. All the information in this article was preceded by the same researchers who performed CT scans with spotless remains that were found in Morocco.
This discovery was published in iScience, associated with an image showing the necks of bicycle-like creatures due to their spoke-shaped structures:
Scientists believe that the “light” construction of the necks provided strength without impeding the ability to fly.
A professor of paleobiology at Portsmouth, Dr. Dave Martill, explained things, while having real credibility on the subject.
“It’s different from anything you’ve seen in an animal’s vertebrae before,” Martill said. “The neural tube is placed centrally inside the vertebra and is connected to the outer wall by a series of thin rods, similar to the rod, arranged radially like the spokes of a bicycle wheel and arranged helically along the length of the vertebra. They even cross like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Evolution has shaped these creatures into wonderful, amazingly efficient butterflies. ”
The researchers had intended to learn more about the shapes / movements of the pterosaur’s neck, but the ability to look at it with a CT scan proved too tempting to get over.
A further analysis concluded that only 50 of the “spokes” in the animal’s neck could increase the bending strength by 90%.
The author with the best billing in the report, Cariad Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, put things in perspective.
“These animals have ridiculously long necks, and in some species the fifth vertebra in the head is as long as the animal’s body,” Williams said. “It makes a giraffe look perfectly normal. We wanted to know a little bit about how this incredibly long neck worked, because it seems to have very little mobility between each vertebra. ”
Pterosaurs began to move into the sky at the end of the Triassic period (237 million years ago), but were removed when the Cretaceous period ended (66 million years ago) by the same thing that destroyed the dinosaurs. They’re also not dinosaurs (good continuation), and the image at the top is a pterodactyl, which is a extinct genus of … you know what, you’ll guess you don’t care. He blames the websites for complying with legal matters.
Here is an artist’s interpretation of everything you’ve read down to the last two sentences:
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