By Elizabeth Hunter
Paleontologists have discovered pterodactyls were able to fly and dominate the skies 225 million years ago because of a vane in their tales.
Pterosaurs – commonly known as pterodactyls – were the first and largest vertebrates to achieve powered flight.
They did so with the aid of a lattice-like vane, attached to the tip of their tails, research reveals.
The diamond-shaped structure, made from interwoven membranes, prevented pterosaurs’ long tails from fluttering like flags in the wind and instead helped to guide and stabilize the creatures in flight.
Previous research revealed that maintaining stiffness in the tail vane was crucial to enable early pterosaur’s flight, but exactly how this was achieved remained a mystery, until now.
The study, led by paleontologists from the University of Edinburgh discovered that that the tail vane most likely behaved like a sail on a ship, becoming tense as the wind blew through the cross-linked membranes to steer the ancient reptiles through the sky.
Dr. Natalia Jagielska, lead author and PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh, said: “It never ceases to astound me that, despite the passing of hundreds of millions of years, we can put skin on the bone of animals we will never see in our lifetimes.
“Pterosaurs were wholly unique animals with no modern equivalents, with a huge elastic membrane stretching from their ankle to the tip of the hyper-elongated fourth finger. For all we know, figuring out how pterosaur membranes worked, may inspire new aircraft technologies.”
Studying prehistoric animals is usually restricted to examining fossilized bone but sometimes traces of delicate tissues such as skin and membranes can survive for millions of years, experts say.
The research team used a new technique called Laser Simulated Fluorescence – which causes organic tissues almost invisible to the naked eye to glow – on the fossils of a pterosaur known as Rhamphorhynchus.
Despite being 150 million years old, the delicate membrane of Rhamphorhynchus’ tail vane and its internal structures visibly popped up when scanned with the laser, providing the team with valuable insight into Pterosaurs’ anatomy and evolution.â¯â¯â¯
Pterosaurs thrived in the skies for more than a hundred million years, before perishing with the dinosaurs in the end-Cretaceous extinction.
The research, published in the journal eLife, was led by scientists from the University of Edinburgh and the Chinese University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh and the Natural History Museum, London.
Dr. Nick Fraser, Keeper of Natural Sciences, National Museums Scotland, said: “Without the researchers’ vision to apply new technology to apparently well-understood fossils, this tail vane would have remained in the dark.
“It is exciting to now see a critical feature of the pterosaur’s anatomy so beautifully displayed.”
Dr. Jordan Bestwick, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Zurich, who was not involved in this study, said: “This study gives us an important glimpse into how early pterosaurs may have first taken to the skies and the importance of their tails while in the air.
“The study also raises intriguing possibilities for how pterosaurs may have used their tails to attract a mate; pterosaur tails may have been more colorful than we ever thought.”
