How to Ride a Pterosaur, According to Science

From the BBC: “Dur­ing the Late Cre­ta­ceous, winged pre­his­toric crea­tures called pterosaurs dom­i­nat­ed the air. They were the first ver­te­brates to mas­ter flight. They were not dinosaurs but close­ly relat­ed. Some were tiny, but some were the biggest crea­tures ever to have flown. We ask a ques­tion you’ve all been won­der­ing, could we ride one, and if so, how?” In the ani­ma­tion above, sci­ence pro­duc­er Pierange­lo Pirak explores some ideas Dr. Liz Mar­tin-Sil­ver­stone, a palaeon­tol­o­gist with a keen inter­est in bio­me­chan­ics. She runs the Palaeo­bi­ol­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ries, includ­ing the XTM Imag­ing Facil­i­ty for microCT scan­ning and imag­ing analy­sis, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol.

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via TheKidsShould­SeeThis

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Foot­prints That Could Be the World’s Ear­li­est Cave Art

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters (1914)

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage