They ruled the skies for 150 million years, until about 65 million year ago. We five only seen them fly in movies like Jurassic World, but extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs (Greek for “wing lizard”) stand out for their evolutionary success. Today, paleontologists like Kevin Padian at the University of California, Berkeley, gush about these flying animals. He says, “Pterosaurs were just the coolest things that were ever in the air.” Now, pterosaurs may help us humans soar to new heights. They’re inspiring the design of remarkable new aircraft like none seen before.
Don’t Call Them ‘Dinosaurs’
“Technically, pterosaurs are not members of the dinosaur family,” explains Liz Martin-Silverstone. She’s a paleobiologist at England’s University of Bristol. “They are a related kind of reptile.”
Pterosaurs went extinct at the same time as dinosaurs. “Yet pterosaurs were far from failures,” says. They were the equivalent in size to a range of flying devices that we humans design today, from small hand-held drones to private planes.
