Some people like horror movies, and some people like dinosaurs, probably for the same reason. NewScientist (4 February 2017) reports on a new discovery which makes me shudder even as it delights me:
The newly unearthed fossils from the Transylvania region of Romania date from 70 million years ago. They reveal a little-known azhdarchid, Hatzegopteryx, with a short, massive neck. Much stronger than others in the same family, it probably feasted on bigger prey, such as dinosaurs the size of a small horse (PeerJ, doi.org/bxvs).
“The bones we are taking out of Romania show a much more robust and massive animal than we previously imagined,” says Mark Witton at Portsmouth University, UK. Hatzegopteryx would have been an apex predator, a bit like T. rex. With a jaw half a metre wide, it could have swallowed a small human or a child, says Witton.
A small horse!
An azhdarchid is part of the Pterosaur family, the big gliders you often see in various dinosaur movies and documentaries. One, in fact, shows up The People That Time Forgot, trying to get at the people in the flying machine (I shan’t grace it with the more modern appellation airplane), although they made the mistake, I think, of calling it a pterodactyl – if I remember my childhood model building proper, the pterodactyls had the tails with the diamond-shaped bone mass at the end, while pteranadons did not, so I think it was a pteranadon.
The azhdarchid even have a blog dedicated to them, Azhdarchid Paleobiology, although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2008, sad to say. The lovely illustration to the right comes from that blog. A quick perusal shows some comparative illustrations. An illustration on a Scientific American blog shows them the size of giraffes! Now I’m feeling small. And helpless. Maybe I shouldn’t sleep tonight.
