Fossilized Pterosaur Eggs Hold Perfectly Preserved Embryos Inside (LiveScience)
By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | November 30, 2017 04:06pm ET
The discovery of 215 fossilized pterosaur eggs has revealed a new finding about the young of these ancient reptiles: Pterosaur babies likely couldn't fly after hatching and probably needed their parents to take care of them.
An examination of 16 embryos within these eggs shows that the little pterosaurs had well-developed thigh bones, suggesting that the reptiles could walk shortly after hatching, according to a new study describing the findings. But because the embryos had underdeveloped bones supporting the pectoral muscle — the muscle that helps power flight — it's unlikely that newborn pterosaurs could fly, the study researchers said.
"Bones related to flight were less developed, or ossified, than bones of the hind limb, which indicates that hatchlings might be able to walk, but not fly," study co-researcher Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Brazil and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told Live Science in an email. [Photos: Baby Pterosaurs Couldn't Fly as Hatchlings]
Pterosaurs lived during the dinosaur age, but they weren't dinosaurs. Rather, they were winged reptiles that went extinct when a 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago. The fact that these flying reptiles laid eggs wasn't confirmed until 2004, when researchers announced that they had found two pterosaur eggs in China and one egg in Argentina that held well-developed embryos, according to D. Charles Deeming, a principal lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, who wrote a perspective on the new study, but wasn't involved with the new research.
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more: https://www.livescience.com/61067-pterosaur-babies-could-not-fly.html
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6367/1197 (abstract; full article behind paywall)
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