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Sources and further reading: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U…

Thank you to Lexi McQueen! @blackgirlmage.bsky.social‬ @blackgirlmage
And to Mark Witton for the illustrations / markwitton

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Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest known flying animals, survives in science as sixteen wing bones pulled from Cretaceous Big Bend by grad student Doug Lawson in 1971. Paleontologists reverse-engineer the rest of its body by referencing its Azhdarchid cousins like Zhejiangopterus, and Q. lawsoni, making inferences from extant archosaurs like birds and alligators, examining trackways, and modeling their wings in flight software. Still, there’s a lot that they don’t know about how these giant pterosaurs lived. Thin bone walls, rare 3-D preservation, and million-to-one erosion odds explain why cousins Hatzegopteryx, Arambourgiania, Cryodrakon, and Thanatosdrakon remain fragmentary in the fossil record. The sparse clues they left behind have inspired a wide range of depictions in documentaries over the years, the pinnacle of which was Prehistoric Planet from the BBC’s Natural History team.

Chapters:
0:00 Love at first sight
2:20 He found it in Texas
4:09 Meet the Azhdarchids
6:02 Why these bones are rare
8:11 Pterosaur bodies
9:43 Cousins
11:50 Dissections
13:15 Footprints
14:27 Flight
15:52 Unknowns

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