Pterosaurs [b] [c] are an extinct clade of flying reptiles in the order Pterosauria. They existed during most of the Mesozoic: from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 million to 66 million years ago). [9] Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known …

Oct 5, 2022 · Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to take to the air. Flapping with wings made of a membrane stretched over ludicrously-elongated fourth fingers, these flying reptiles filled the skies...

Dec 9, 2020 · Ixalerpeton was a 233-million-year-old creature that belonged to a group of reptiles called lagerpetids, which are suspected to be the precursors of pterosaurs. For more than 160 million years,...

Mar 14, 2025 · Ancestors of pterosaurs tended toward a bipedal gait, which thus freed the forelimbs for other uses. These limbs evolved into wings in birds and pterosaurs, but, instead of feathers , pterosaurs developed a wing surface formed by …

Aug 18, 2023 · As if the thought of a flying pterosaur with a 6.5 foot wingspan dominating Earth’s skies wasn’t terrifying enough, paleontologists have now found an even older pterosaur ancestor with some...

Sep 26, 2019 · One animal often cited as a pterosaur ancestor is Scleromochlus, a tiny kangaroo-like archosaur that lived in the early Late Triassic (237-ish million years ago) and probably hopped adorably through the desert.

These kinds of trees are very important for us as they allow us to make important inferences about the evolution of certain groups. Since we know that for example that all of the pterodactyloids share a common ancestor then the descendents of that ancestor should have inherited its characteristics.

Dec 9, 2020 · Pterosaurs may have dominated the skies for 150 million years, but how they gained their wings has been a mystery. Now, recently unearthed fossils may help fill a gap in the flying predators' family tree, according to a study published in Nature today.

Dec 9, 2020 · But beyond knowing that pterosaurs were archosaurs, a group that includes dinosaurs, birds and crocodylians, scientists haven't figured out the pterosaur's immediate ancestors — animals that...

Oct 1, 2021 · Pterosaurs were a long-lived and highly diverse clade of flying reptiles that first appeared in the fossil record in the early-middle Late Triassic (Benton, 1985; Bennett, 1997; Barrett et al., 2008; Upchurch et al., 2015).