In an eat-or-be-eaten world, flight conveys a bevy of benefits. A creature that takes to the third dimension can more easily escape earthbound predators, dine off a much broader menu or drop down on ...

Flight is a rare skill in the animal world. Among vertebrates, it evolved only three times: in bats, birds, and the long-extinct pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were the pioneers, taking to the skies more than ...

Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. Read the paper: Enigmatic dinosaur precursors bridge ...

Tucked away in a remote bonebed in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park laid hundreds of fossils, including a fragile jawbone belonging to one of the oldest-known flying reptiles: the pterosaur.

The Mesozoic pterosaur is considered to be the first vertebrate to achieve powered flight and new evidence, also the first of its kind, helps to pin down what exactly this flying reptile ate.

Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to master powered flight, did so with brains that were far smaller than many scientists expected. New fossil reconstructions show that these ancient reptiles relied ...

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A study determines when and how pterosaurs went from tiny tree-climbers to towering terrestrial titans Flying reptiles first came down from the trees in the mid-Jurassic Period, paving the way for ...

Pterosaurs were an amazing group of flying reptiles that occupied the skies around the same time that dinosaurs roamed on land. Appearing in the fossil record around 230 million years ago, pterosaurs ...

A few years ago, Maria McNamara was invited to Brussels by fellow paleontologist Pascal Godefroit and presented with an intriguing opportunity. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited ...