Wednesday, May 28, 2008

More on the Darren-Mark Pterosaur Paper



Darren and Mark are the authors of the paper that I linked to yesterday. Darren has commented on his Science Blogs blog about the paper. So has Mark commented on his Flickr site. Together they wrote up a blog for the paper. I'm a bit ambivalent about this since it'll effective be a dead blog unless they are going to do more work in the future. I don't like dead/archive blogs. They, perhaps, ought to have put this all in wikipedia or somewhere else as an article (or set of articles).

I do have to wonder though: how could a big strutter like the azhdarchids would survive in the Late Cretaceous with the theropods running around. I think they need to do some functional movement work to demonstrate the grounded uber pterosaurs aren't going to be a snack. Can they transition to flight fast enough? Are they quick on the ground? I am not raining on their model, but suggesting some checks for it.

3 comments:

  1. That's a good question, although Darren & Mark seem to think that azhdzarchids were fleet of foot on the ground, and they had a quick jumping takeoff. If they saw trouble, I'm betting it didn't take the beasties long to fly the heck away.

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  2. yabbut...

    The lifestyle they postulate has the bigguns looking DOWN all the time. That limits them being able to watch a whole lot. How are the ears? Are they good enough to hear a stalking set of manitraptors? or moderate sized theropods?

    Or would there have to have been multiple critters to help watch? A flock? or whatever you call a pterosaur grouping.

    Furthermore, the light of foot thing again, they had better be FAST because unlike a stork, these guys would have cast a huge shadow.

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  3. Anonymous12:08 PM

    It would be hard to sneak up on a creature whose eyes are 5m+ above the ground, and can get airborne in 600 milliseconds.

    A question of greater moment: what *do* we call a bunch of them? If we trust Mark and Darren, we have a "procession of azhdarchids". If we emphasize their ninja-nature, we have a "dojo" or perhaps a "blitzkrieg".

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