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Weird Fossilized Flying Reptile 'A Vision of Hell'
Yahoo! News ^ | Thu Jul 18, 2:04 PM ET | Will Dunham

Posted on 07/18/2002 8:21:03 PM PDT by AM2000

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have found the remains of one of the weirdest creatures ever discovered -- a big flying reptile that lived during the time of the dinosaurs that snapped up fish with a scissors-like beak as it skimmed over the water and had a head crowned by a huge, bony crest.

Brazilian ( news - web sites) scientists Alexander Kellner and Diogenes de Almeida Campos on Thursday described a previously unknown type of pterosaur (pronounced TER-oh-sawr), winged reptiles that were cousins of the dinosaurs.

The find is important both for the oddity of its cranial crest and for the insight that the animal offers into how pterosaurs hunted for food, the researchers said. They named it Thalassodromeus sethi (pronounced thal-ahs-oh-DROH-mee-us SETH-ee), meaning "sea runner" and "Seth," for the ancient Egyptian god of evil and chaos.

Kellner said Thalassodromeus, which lived 110 million years ago, had a head that measured 4-1/2 feet long due to the size of its crest, a wingspan of nearly 15 feet and a body length of about 6 feet.

"If you didn't have the fossils, you wouldn't believe that such an animal would have ever lived," Kellner said in a telephone interview from Rio de Janeiro.

"Can you imagine such an animal just cruising over the water and skimming over the surface in your direction? It must have been, really, a vision of hell," added Kellner, of the National Museum in Rio.

Searching for food, Thalassodromeus probably glided low over the water in a brackish inland lagoon, its lower jaw skimming the surface of the water, ready to nab any tasty fish or crustaceans it encountered, said Kellner, whose findings were published in the journal Science.

Similarities between this pterosaur's flattened jaws, which end in a scissors-like beak, and the beak of a type of living bird called Rynchops prompted the belief that Thalassodromeus, like these so-called skimmer birds, skimmed over the water's surface, with the lower jaw slightly submerged, Kellner said.

"The new pterosaur from Brazil gives us important information about the feeding strategy of pterosaurs," Fabio Dalla Vecchia, a pterosaur expert at the Paleontological Museum of Monfalcone, Italy, told Reuters.

A REMARKABLE FAMILY CREST

The most eye-popping characteristic of Thalassodromeus is its large, thin, cranial crest that looks with its V-shaped end like a giant spearhead or knife blade. The bony crest makes up about three-quarters of the animal's head. Proportionately, it is the largest such crest of any known extinct or living vertebrate, with the exception of one other type of pterosaur.

"This is pretty close to the far end of weird," said Christopher Bennett, a pterosaur expert at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut who has seen the new specimen. "But pterosaurs are really weird animals."

The crest is covered by a network of grooves that Kellner said represented an extensive system of blood vessels that the pterosaur may have employed to regulate its body temperature -- in this case, cooling off.

Bennett called this "a reasonable conclusion," but said there is "an awful lot of evidence to suggest that crests were used for sexual display" in other pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, although both were highly successful types of reptiles. Both appeared about 225 million years ago during the Triassic Period and flourished until 65 million years ago, when an asteroid or other big extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth. Some fossils suggest that pterosaurs had a fur-like body covering.

Pterosaurs were the Earth's first flying vertebrates, appearing many millions of years before birds or bats.

Thalassodromeus lived in the middle of the Cretaceous period -- the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs.

Little is known about pterosaurs because their lightly built bones do not lend themselves to fossilization. Kellner describes Thalassodromeus in the journal Science based on a well-preserved skull found in 1983 at the fossil-rich Santana Formation in northeastern Brazil. He said bones from other parts of the body have been found there, allowing him to determine the animal's wingspan and body size.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: crevolist
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To: keithtoo
Isn't it interesting that, not only do all depictions or dragons look alike, they virtually ALL have wings! What are the odds of that?

Actually, about zero, because it's not true. I take it you've never seen Chinese dragons?

No wings. Chinese dragons throughout history are virtually never depicted as having wings. You can see lots more examples here.

61 posted on 07/19/2002 6:00:44 AM PDT by general_re
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To: Maceman; VadeRetro
As I say, reptiles are cold blooded, and dinosaurs were not. Therefore, dinosaurs were NOT reptiles, although they had been mistakenly classified as such since their first discovery in the 1700s.

There's evidence that some of the dinosaurs may have had endothermic features, in a primitive way, that is, not in the same way of modern mammals or birds. Birds are reptiles too, btw.

62 posted on 07/19/2002 6:24:59 AM PDT by Nebullis
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To: capitan_refugio; Maceman
capitan_refugio explains it well. I just saw the post. Thanks.
63 posted on 07/19/2002 6:28:11 AM PDT by Nebullis
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To: parsifal
There have been live pteradactyl sightings in Texas in the last couple of decades. Are we sure these things are extinct? parsy.

That would be since the Carlos Casteneda books? :-)

64 posted on 07/19/2002 6:53:23 AM PDT by decimon
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To: medved
Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.

Or a bird watcher.


65 posted on 07/19/2002 7:05:24 AM PDT by StriperSniper
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To: keithtoo
bump
66 posted on 07/19/2002 7:07:30 AM PDT by Centurion2000
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To: Paul Atreides
Your picture really startled me. Jeez scare the hell out of me next time.
67 posted on 07/19/2002 7:12:23 AM PDT by KSCITYBOY
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To: AM2000
Ok - I've got a really stupid question - Why were these creatures so large. The are very few large creatures around today. I mean what in their environment encouraged them to be as large as they were? I mean food was plentiful - still is? What was different then?
68 posted on 07/19/2002 7:16:06 AM PDT by KSCITYBOY
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To: KSCITYBOY
I'm sure part of the answer is that the larger ones preserved better.
69 posted on 07/19/2002 7:24:12 AM PDT by StriperSniper
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To: AM2000
UUUUMMMMMM - Pterosaur on toast!
70 posted on 07/19/2002 7:35:08 AM PDT by sandydipper
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To: StriperSniper
Good point, but still the only thing close to the today seem to be whales.
71 posted on 07/19/2002 7:36:08 AM PDT by KSCITYBOY
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To: AM2000
Did they find a fossilized Nazgul close by?
72 posted on 07/19/2002 7:37:56 AM PDT by Saturnalia
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To: StriperSniper
You know I suppose if these creatures we around a lot longer than man with a plentiful food supply they might have just grown progressively larger with size being a good attribute until some factor came along to limit there size. I wonder if supplied with plenty of food over a very long time would mankind grow extermly large?
73 posted on 07/19/2002 7:40:03 AM PDT by KSCITYBOY
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To: Maceman
a big flying reptile

The article states that is was NOT a dinosaur.

74 posted on 07/19/2002 7:43:35 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets
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To: KSCITYBOY
I wonder if supplied with plenty of food over a very long time would mankind grow extermly large?

Since we are intelligent (I know that could be debated ;-), if that happened, we would probably be directing it. I don't have any handy data but humans have on average increased in size by a significant percentage just over the last hundred years, so it would seem likely until some kind of limit due to the physics of our basic structure.

75 posted on 07/19/2002 7:54:31 AM PDT by StriperSniper
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To: keithtoo
That's not a dragon. It's a wyvern...
76 posted on 07/19/2002 8:06:07 AM PDT by null and void
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To: Jimer
That's a dragon. Four legs...
77 posted on 07/19/2002 8:08:10 AM PDT by null and void
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To: Nebullis
There's evidence that some of the dinosaurs may have had endothermic features, in a primitive way, that is, not in the same way of modern mammals or birds. Birds are reptiles too, btw.

Birds are most decidedly NOT reptiles. They are of the class aves, one of the five classes of vertebrates. The other four classes are: fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals.

There is very strong evidence that dinosaurs could not have been cold-blooded and survived. Some of the things that back up this assertion are:

*Large sauropods would never have been able to rely on external temperatures to heat their bodies because of their size, and the amount of time it would have taken them to "heat up" would have left virtually no time for any other activity.

* Predator/prey ratios among concentrations of fossilized remains indicates that the ratio was much closer to that of warm blloded predator environments. For example, consider lions vs. zebras (i.e. relatively small numbers of lions, who must consume eat frequent and consume large numbers of prey to maintain their metabolism, relative to the prey population. If the predator dinosaurs were truly cold blooded, smaller populations of prey animals would be able to support relatively large populations of predators, because reptiles don't need to consume so many calories to maintain their metabolism.

*The apparent lifestyle of the two-legged raptor-type dinosaurs required a great deal of energy to chase and kill prey. The current belief is that they were aggressive predators with a lot of stamina, as opposed to cold blooded reptiles who mostly lie in wait and are capable only of relatively short bursts of energetic activity.

I am not a paleontologist, but I have done a lot of reading on this subject, and was absolutely stunned back in the late '70s when a scientific consensue began to emerge that dinosaurs really were warm-blooded. I know there are some paleontologists who disagree with that premise, but they are relatively few in number, so I am given to understand.

78 posted on 07/19/2002 8:16:53 AM PDT by Maceman
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To: parsifal
Parsi, of course they're extinct! Science says so! Why, the Ceolocanth is extinct too!.....

(I know, they were found in the indian ocean... or so..)

79 posted on 07/19/2002 9:41:46 AM PDT by Darksheare
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To: OHelix; blam

http://www.dixiexfiles.homestead.com/thunderbird.html

80 posted on 07/19/2002 10:31:55 AM PDT by JudyB1938
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