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Learn more about pterosaurs with these videos or stomp into DinoDigs to learn about more prehistoric pals! Pterodactyls were blessed with a rare gift that many dinosaurs lacked: flight. If they were herbivorous, they would have had the advantage of feeding on the tops of trees where no other creature could reach. Since you know the pterosaur was a carnivore, how did its flight abilities translate into its everyday diet?
Here is what the pterodactyl ate. As scavengers, pterodactyls had no qualms about feeding on whatever was most convenient.
In their youth, pterodactyls were believed to consume invertebrate insects. In the early days of pterosaurs , this feeding behavior might have continued into adulthood, but pterodactyls mostly evolved out of eating insects their entire lives.
Suppose you go back and look at the skeleton modeling of the Crocodylus acutus as illustrated in the Nature Communications study. Thus, it makes sense that pterosaurs could easily pierce into the hard shells of insects and eat the tender meat within. An article from Wired that cites the Nature Communications study posits one reason why pterosaurs might have evolved to consume fish: because the insect supply was running low as other dinosaurs also picked off the hard-shelled invertebrates.
Dinosaurs either had to have had a long neck to dip their heads into the water, or they must have possessed flight abilities. Pterodactyls had the latter. The Wired article mentions that experts believe that pterodactyls could have been able to fly almost immediately upon birth. If other creatures were dredged up from the ocean, it could have been that the pterodactyl consumed these animals as well. For instance, shellfish, squids, clams, and crab could have been on the menu.
National Geographic , in , suggests that pterodactyls would have consumed birds and pterosaurs, especially smaller creatures. Since pterodactyls could fly , they could home in on and chase their prey. The only exception might be dinosaurs with very long necks. Depending on the height the pterosaurs were flying, a long-necked dino species could have extended its neck to reach a pterosaur or bird mid-air.
Reptiles were easy for pterosaurs to feed on. Like they would probably hover over the water and then pluck at their prey, pterodactyls could do the same on land. Why go through all the trouble of microwear analysis? Because teeth can lie. Imagine I handed you a panda skull and a polar bear skull and had you examine the shapes of their heads and teeth.
They'll look quite similar, even though a polar bear eats seals almost exclusively, and a panda specializes in bamboo. And so you need kind of a more quantitative experimental way of looking at diet. Also, like modern alligators, some pterosaur species may have fed on a variety of foods.
Microwear analysis allowed Bestwick and his colleagues to even peer into the mysterious upbringings of individual pterosaurs. Luckily, these researchers had teeth from Rhamphorhynchus specimens of various ages. The teeth of babies indicated they fed more on invertebrates, like insects, while the adults ate fish. Their analysis lends further evidence to the idea that pterosaurs were good to go, right out of the egg.
Baby crocodiles and alligators out of the egg, they're nippy and ready to feed. Microwear analysis, then, could be a powerful tool for confirming what paleobiologists already suspected about the lifestyles of pterosaurs. If it doesn't tell you it ate the thing we know it ate, then your microwear analysis isn't working. If it tells you that it did eat that stuff, then it is working.
The technology might also expose dietary changes among members of the same species, Habib says. One population of a pterosaur species may have split off from the main group and decamped to a new environment to exploit a different food source. Bestwick and his colleagues also used microwear analysis to look across evolutionary time.
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