Fossil study brings us one step closer to revealing how ‘flying dinosaurs’ took flight

If you think of flying dinosaurs, you probably picture an animal with long, leathery wings, sharp claws and a big beak. The animal you are imagining is not a dinosaur, it’s from a group of flying reptiles called the pterosaurs.
These animals are remarkable in their own right: they were the first vertebrates to evolve flight, tens of millions of years before birds or bats. Perhaps people think they are dinosaurs because pterosaurs are sometimes referred to as flying dinosaurs in children’s books. Whatever the reason, pterosaurs deserve attention in their own right.
To this day, a conundrum surrounds pterosaurs: how did they evolve to fly? The evolution of flight has been mapped out for birds.
There is a pathway from the development of feathers for display to arboreal (tree-climbing) gliders, then powered flight. However, even the earliest known pterosaurs were specialized flyers with a body molded for flight.
We are yet to find any fossils that give us clues about how pterosaurs first took off from the ground.
Pterosaurs lived alongside the dinosaurs, during a time known as the Mesozoic era (252 to 66 million years ago). They came in a huge variety of forms and ranged the entire globe.
Although the most ancient pterosaurs were small, no bigger than seagulls, later members of the group were the largest flying animals to ever exist, with wingspans similar to small planes.
Although pterosaurs were relatives of the dinosaurs, they were an entirely separate group, much in the same way that turtles and crocodiles are related (both are reptiles), but are distinct, with different ancestral origins. Dinosaurs did not fly until true birds (which are a group of dinosaurs) evolved. So pterosaurs were the only reptiles capable of flying for a very long time.
Fossil study brings us one step closer to revealing how ‘flying dinosaurs’ took flight