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| - I’ve been enjoying the previously unreported sonic qualities pterosaur wings a lot this week. Thanks to the need to paint some fibreglass pterosaur wing membranes and a newfound obsession with the heavy beats of Florence and the Machine, I’ve been smacking out tunes with paintbrushes on the folded wings of our giant male azhdarchid model, tastefully named Bamofo, all week. Hit them hard enough with a paint-slopped brush and they make a noise unlike that of a walloped bass drum, albeit one that splashes paint everywhere and renders the artist and workshop looking like a Jackson Pollock canvas. With the amount of paint I find on the walls, floor and my hands, arms, shoulders, chest, neck and face after a particularly enthusiastic rendition of Dog Days Are Over, I’m surprised any colour has m
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| abstract
| - I’ve been enjoying the previously unreported sonic qualities pterosaur wings a lot this week. Thanks to the need to paint some fibreglass pterosaur wing membranes and a newfound obsession with the heavy beats of Florence and the Machine, I’ve been smacking out tunes with paintbrushes on the folded wings of our giant male azhdarchid model, tastefully named Bamofo, all week. Hit them hard enough with a paint-slopped brush and they make a noise unlike that of a walloped bass drum, albeit one that splashes paint everywhere and renders the artist and workshop looking like a Jackson Pollock canvas. With the amount of paint I find on the walls, floor and my hands, arms, shoulders, chest, neck and face after a particularly enthusiastic rendition of Dog Days Are Over, I’m surprised any colour has made it onto the model at all. Seriously: given my choice of using blue shading on Bamafo’s leading wing edges, a good day at work means I could easily pass as an extra in Braveheart. To date, there’s not been any indication that any pterosaurs lost these impromptu percussion devices, nor scaled back their wing anatomy enough to assume that, winged or not, they had abandoned flight. Accordingly, I’m not aware of many – if any – pterosaurologists who consider that any known pterosaur was secondarily flightless. Unlike theropod dinosaurs, which seem to have developed and lost flight numerous times in their evolutionary history, it seems that all pterosaurs - even the biggest 250 kg jobbies - were able to takeoff and fly about with minimal fuss (Marden 1994; Habib 2008). Buffetaut et al. (2002) raised the possibility that the giant azhdarchid Hatzegopteryx may have been flightless, but ruled it out on grounds that the holotype humerus bears the same volant characteristics as it’s smaller brethren. Sato et al. (2009) suggested that pterosaurs spanning more than 5.1 m and massing more than 41 kg would be incapable of flight, thereby grounding a good number of forms including many long-winged, tiny legged ornithocheiroids. Without going into too much detail, this work is quite problematic and I’m pretty sure these conclusions have not been accepted by the pterosaur community: a rebuttal paper, penned by Mike Habib and myself, is under review, and Ross Elgin has posted similarly-minded comments on the Dragons of the Air blog. I suggested that mass and wingspan of Dimorphodon may have combined to produce a relatively ineffective flier that only took to the air to cover ground quickly or escape predation (Witton 2008): this could be taken as a suggestion that dimorphodontids were moving towards abandoning flight, but there’s no reason to assume that it had been totally lost. Despite this, the subject of flightless pterosaurs has been brought up in informal circles a number of times: along with numerous discussions of the topic on blogs and the Dinosaur Mailing List, flightless pterosaurs have appeared on Tet Zoo here (along with being discussed in the comments of several other Tet Zoo posts) and were famously depicted as giraffe-like critters in The New Dinosaurs by Dixon (1988). In such discussions, it seems generally accepted that there’s no reason why pterosaurs shouldn’t have abandoned flight given the right selection pressures: as long as they could find enough to eat, reach suitable areas for reproducing and, by whatever means, achieve relief from predators, the terrestrial abilities of pterosaurs were probably sufficient to let them hang up their wings and let them become fully terrestrialised again. I’m in full agreement with this and, here, want to share some old speculations (drawn at the end of 2008) of flightless pterosaurs, complete with horrible, unimaginative Latin and Greek names. The drawings are a bit crude, but I’ve not had time to spruce them up – nor will I in the foreseeable future. Unlike most speculative flightless pterosaur creations, though, I haven’t just picked on azhdarchids: although they may have been more terrestrially proficient than other pterosaurs (Witton and Naish 2008), I’m sure other clades would be equally capable of abandoning flight. As such, some of imaginings here would not necessarily post-date the known pterosaur record: many would have existed side-by-side with flying (and Mesozoic) pterosaurs.
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