Giants of the Ancient Skies - Azhdarchids (Part 1)

the as darka pterosaurs are truly one of the most impressive groups of animals that have ever graced this planet these absolutely huge creatures were not only the largest pterosaurs but some were also the largest flying animals of all time now I've realized that I seem to have severely neglected pterosaurs on this channel with the last video fully dedicated to these remarkable creatures being over two years old so I thought now would be a good time to sort that out and what better way than to cover my personal favorite group of pterosaurs the awesome as dark it's as dark it's were a highly successful pterosaur group that proliferated towards the very end of the Cretaceous period whilst many other pterosaurs are thought to have been going extinct but there's also traces of their presence way back at the very start of the Cretaceous as well although slightly controversial it does seem fairly probable that as dockets were around then - meaning that the group lasted for about 80 million years in total making these animals the longest surviving family of pterosaurs and that's not the only success they as dockets had eather fossils representing members of this group have been discovered all over the world from North America to Africa and in Asia indicating that these giant pterosaurs had a distribution that stretched all across the ancient world but the most astounding thing about these animals is how such huge creatures were able to fly with some species standing about as tall as a giraffe and possessing absolutely ridiculous skulls they still managed to take off and fly at considerable speeds high above the prehistoric landscape however that doesn't mean they were restricted to staying up there as we'll see in the next video with summer's dockets being terrifying ground stalkers - so let's take a look at some of the individual species in genera that actually make up this unique pterosaur grouping first there's the animal the very carnie gave its name to the whole family as darker coming from towards the beginning of the Late Cretaceous as darker was first discovered in the be sexy formation of Uzbekistan this pterosaur was described in 1984 being used to create the group as darken a which at that time was included within the larger Pteranodon Ted family of course once other similar creatures were eventually discovered they were put into their own family be as dark a day instead of as dokkan a and reclassified outside of the Pteranodon tots quite a few fragmentary remains unknown from as dark Oh including several neck vertebrae bones from the wings and bits of jaw the neck vertebrae are very important here as they're one of the main defining features that we use to identify which pterosaurs are as Dawkins this family share neck vertebrae they have the characteristic of being very elongated as well as being fairly rounded in cross-section towards the middles of the bones and it's these features that give as Dawkins the wry conic long necks the paleontologist who described as darker back in 1984 Levin Esav noticed these features in several different pterosaurs thus using this as a reason to classify them all together in the same group mess off also notice that the bones and as Darko's neck joined together in such a way that meant it likely would have not had much flexibility there and he came to the conclusion that the animal must have been some kind of skim feeder restricted to lowering his head down to the water to scoop up organisms as it flew above the surface we'll talk much more about as dark at paleo ecology in the next episode but since 1984 it's been revealed that these pterosaurs were almost certainly not skin feeders instead employing a very different feeding technique next up the most famous as dark it Quetzalcoatlus this absolutely enormous creature was among the biggest flying animals that ever existed with recent reliable estimates put in there pterosaurs wingspan at about ten point five meters across and a standing height of over five meters tall now despite Quetzalcoatlus status as the most famous as dogged and how often it is portrayed in various media not a lot is actually known for certain about it interestingly there are in fact two different species of Quetzalcoatl us known at the moment the huge Quetzalcoatl isnora P as well as a smaller unnamed species currently known as Quetzalcoatl s spur the remains of the larger species were first discovered in 1971 in 68 million year old rocks in Texas parts of an enormous wing were uncovered and it was clear that they belonged to a creature of a significant size however this is all we have of the species it's not at all a well-known pterosaur unlike the other Quetzalcoatl species of which there are several partial skeletons known so it's actually largely due to the better-known smaller species that we get the familiar reconstructions of a giant quetzalcoatlus northropi form unfortunately not a lot has been done to clarify what relation the two Quetzalcoatl is forms actually have to one another and it could turn out that they're the same species or two different ones this makes accurately reconstructing the point five meter wingspan animal very difficult and could even bring into doubt the size estimates of the creature if the forms end up being from very different as dockets in short a lot more work is needed to sort out the mess surrounding the taxonomy and relationships of Quetzalcoatl but there clearly was a pretty huge as docket roaming late cretaceous Texas now he come to a very interesting member of the US docket family has he got Rex this giant was discovered in Late Cretaceous rocks from Transylvania which represent what was an island habitat during the Cretaceous period located in the prehistoric thethethe sea this island is known as haddock island and the enormous as dockets that lived there seemed of Bheem its rulers the first bones discovered of this animal were actually thought to be the fossil remains of some sort of theropod dinosaur due to how robust and big they were but it was later realized that they represented a new pterosaur and they were named as such in 2002 this animal had a pretty immense skull and neck even foreigners Dockett and a recent 2017 paper drew some very interesting conclusions from an egg vertebra belonging to helicopter X this pterosaur was a large creature however the 2017 paper found that his neck was relatively very short compared to similar sized as dockets and so it turns out that it may have been an extremely powerfully constructed pterosaur that stalks the island environment searching for prey could easily and brutally attack the large powerful skull on the end of a short heavily muscled neck seems like it would have made the perfect weapon to use for this sort of lifestyle and you can imagine the terror such an animal would have instilled in the small dinosaur fauna of hat egg island as well-known pterosaur researcher Marc Whitten who is also one of the authors of the 2017 paper says if you imagine a giant mix of a Shoebill stork a ground hornbill and the terminator you may get an idea as to what Hattie copter X was probably like when it was alive this next as dark attacks on Arenberg iyanya philadelphia has a fairly long and dramatic backstory to it to understand the full tale we first need to go back to the 1940s in jordan early in the decades a railroad worker discovered a fossilized bone poking out of a cliff and it soon found its way into the hands of the director of a local phosphate mine a few years later the fossil was sent to Paris where was examined by french paleontologist camille Ehrenberg who in 18:54 decided that the mysterious bun was a metacarpal from a giant pterosaur five years later in 1959 Aaron Borg gave the animal the awesome name of Titan optics meaning titan wing sadly from then on this fossil did not have a good time soon after the bone was examined by Aaron Borg it became lost to science as no one knew where it had gone or what had happened to it in 1975 a different paleontologist realized that he had actually been misidentified by Aaron Borg and it was not a metacarpal at all instead it was one of the animals characteristic long thin neck vertebrae it was then in the 1980s that it was realized that the name given to the pterosaur Titan optics was already in use by another organism and what kind of animal had stolen the awesome name of titan wing from this giant pterosaur a fly so according to the rules of the iczn the second animal called titan optics had to change its name a russian paleontologist therefore renamed the pterosaur in 1987 calling it aaron Bourgogne after a cameo Arenberg and at this time the original fossil was still missing prompting paleontologist Dave mato and Eber hard fray to go on a quest to rediscover the vertebra they traveled to Jordan in 1995 to search through the collection of the phosphate mine that first lent the bone to aaron Borg in the 50s but were unable to locate the original fossil after returning back to Europe the scientists received word from an engineer of the mine who discovered that the vertebra had been sold to a geologist in the 60s and had then been donated to the University of Jordan in 1973 the bone was indeed found in the collection of the University and so the original fossil could now be properly examined by mortal and Frey their examination revealed that although the bone was not complete it was very large in fact it was larger than the same vertebra in Quetzalcoatlus and by scaling up Aaron Bourgogne the paleontologist found it to have a wingspan of about 13 meters however since this estimate other calculations have arrived at much smaller values more in the region of a seven meter wingspan working out how large this animal was is difficult considering how few fossils of it we have limited to only the original vertebra and possibly a few bits of wing bones and so until more is discovered it's not entirely certain how big aaron Bourgogne could have gotten but the most remarkable thing about Aaron Berger has to be is incredible neck length at an estimated 2.6 to 3 meters long as well as the addition of a massive pointed skull on top of it this creature was up there with one of the longest necks of any tetrapod excluding sauropod dinosaurs as Marc Whitten points out about five meters of neck and head being supported by a few vertebrae they're essentially just thin tubes is a pretty extreme body plan nevertheless adaptations in their vertebrae showed that ehrenberg iyanya was quite able to support this huge mass in fact they could better support large masses with her neck than any other as dockets could do to reinforcements present in their bones so Erin boogie Anya is another incredible as docket species with a dramatic back story and amazing Anatomy though for some reason it doesn't tend to get as much attention in media as the other giant as doctors do right so we've had a brief look at some of the characters that make up this great family of pterosaurs although there are quite a few more that haven't been mentioned here now this video is originally going to be a single episode however for reasons of running out of time I've decided to split it up into two parts in the next video we'll be looking at the biomechanics of just how these huge animals managed to get off the ground and fly about as well as what kind of lifestyle they had I hope you've enjoyed learning about these remarkable creatures and make sure to watch out for part two so you can find out even more if you would like to learn more about our world its history and the wonderful life that surrounds us all please feel free to subscribe to the channel if you think we deserve it and if you would like to see more from us [Music]

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 165,115

Rating: 4.9629765 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones, family friendly, quetzalcoatlus, arambourgiania, azhdarcho, hatzegopteryx, biggest flying animal

Id: dc-mBLiqj5I

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 19 2018