Quetzalcoatlus: The Flying Serpent Of The Dinosaur Era

It had a neck like a giraffe, a pointy beak the size of a man, and wings wider than a fighter jet. This was not some little sparrow.

Meet Quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying creature to ever wing it through Earth’s skies. Quetzalcoatlus — or, to be exact, Quetzalcoatlus northropi (ket-zel-KWAT-a-lus NORTH-rup-eye) — was a giant pterosaur (TER-uh-sawr), a flying reptile that lived during the era of dinosaurs. This amazing creature was named after the Aztec winged serpent god, Quetzalcoatl.

Nizar Ibrahim is a paleontologist — a scientist who studies life long ago. In an interview with the public radio program Science Friday, he explained that Quetzalcoatlus is really difficult to describe. “They’re kind of like dragons from deep time. There’s nothing alive today that really looks anything like a pterosaur.”

The distant cousins of dinosaurs, pterosaurs ruled the skies during the Mesozoic Era, 252 to 66 million years ago. Some were as small as a sparrow, but Quetzalcoatlus was so monstrously large that scientists wondered how it could fly at all.

For years, paleontologists tried to figure out how something as huge as Quetzalcoatlus got off the ground. Did it take off running and start flapping its wings? Maybe it pushed off its wingtips like a vampire bat? Could it get airborne at all?

To find the answer, a group of paleontologists teamed up with a biomechanic — an expert on how living things move — and an aerospace engineer. They studied fossils of Quetzalcoatlus to see where it had the most muscles and how its joints moved.

Their studies found that to begin flying, the mighty pterosaur crouched down and then sprung up about eight feet high in the air. That launch gave it enough room to flap its huge wings and take off.

Once it was flying, Quetzalcoatlus was remarkably well built for the task. Its skeleton showed that the flying reptile not only had really big wings, but it also had huge breastbones — the attachment points for large flight muscles. It had plenty of strength to flap its wings and keep them extended for long flights.

Its bone structure also was perfectly engineered for flight. Like modern birds, the pterosaur’s eggshell-thin bones were hollow and filled with air (instead of the semi-solid marrow found in mammal bones). But that doesn’t mean the bones were weak. Scientists used special scans to look inside Quetzalcoatlus’s long, slender neck bones and found a network of bony struts that gave the bones strength, kind of like how spokes support a bicycle wheel.

Scientists aren’t sure how fast and far Quetzalcoatlus could fly. Some think the giant pterosaur may have been able to soar through the skies for a week without stopping, reaching speeds of 80 miles an hour and covering 8,000 to 12,000 miles. That would be like flying from New York to Japan non-stop!

But just because it could fly long distances doesn’t mean it did. Quetzalcoatlus probably spent a lot of time on land, looking for tasty nibbles like crabs and worms in the waters of its thick forested home. The pterosaur lived in the area that is now Texas — but the area looked way different 70 million years ago.

The first Quetzalcoatlus fossils were found in Texas in 1971, but it’s taken half a century for scientists to figure out how the giant pterosaur could fly. Part of the reason is that Quetzalcoatlus fossils are fairly rare finds, so scientists didn’t have much evidence to study. In addition, unearthing the fragile fossil bones is a painstakingly slow process. “You have these sort of potato chip-like bones preserved in very hard rock, and you've got to remove the bones from the rock without destroying them,” paleontologist Matthew Brown told the news network CNN.

But for paleontologists, discovering how this monstrous pterosaur took to the skies was well worth the wait.