Palaeontologists from China and Brazil recently identified a new species of chaoyangopterid pterosaur.
About Pterosaur:
A pterosaur is any of the flying reptiles that flourished during all periods (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous) of the Mesozoic Era (252.2 million to 66 million years ago).
Although pterosaurs are not dinosaurs, both are archosaurs, or “ruling reptiles,” a group to which birds and crocodiles also belong.
They were also the first animals after insects to evolve powered flight—not just leaping or gliding, but flapping their wings to generate lift and travel through the air.
Pterosaurs were not only the first reptiles capable of flight. They were also the first vertebrates to fly.
It included the largest vertebrate ever known to fly: the late Cretaceous Quetzalcoatlus.
The appearance of flight in pterosaurs was separate from the evolution of flight in birds and bats; pterosaurs are not closely related to either birds or bats and thus provide a classic example of convergent evolution.
Their wings were formed by a sophisticated membrane of skin stretching from the thorax to a dramatically lengthened fourth finger.
The pterosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, around 65.5 million years ago, during the mass extinction known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (K-T extinction event).
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