A bipedal pterosaur video!
Just ran across this Tapejara skeleton take-off, fly and land video from the Huffington Post -and its a bipedal takeoff! The original comes from Texas Tech in November 2012.
Figure 1. Click to animate. Tapejara take-off, flight and landing by the Sankar Chatterjee lab. Red arrows point to morphology problems. 1. Bend humerus back further. 2 Bend elbow more. 3. When the elbow is bent, the pteroid angles out from the radius, framing the propatagium.4. Metacarpal lacking free fingers. 4. Knees should be splayed 5. Extend hind limbs laterally in flight.
The headline reads: Pterosaur ‘Runways’ Enabled Huge Prehistoric Flying Animal To Get Airborne, Study Suggests. By: Douglas Main, LiveScience Contributor
Published: 11/08/2012 03:01 PM EST on LiveScience.
How did pterosaurs takeoff and fly?
According to Main, “A new computer simulation has the answer: These beasts used downward-sloping areas, at the edges of lakes and river valleys, as prehistoric runways to gather enough speed and power to take off, according to a study presented Wednesday (Nov. 7) here at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.” This is Sankar Chatterjee’s hypothesis. “First the animal would start running on all fours,” Texas Tech University scientist Sankar Chatterjee, a co-author of the study, told LiveScience. Then it would shift to its back legs, unfurl its wings and begin flapping. Once it generated enough power and speed, it finally would hop and take to the air, said Chatterjee, who along with his colleagues created a video simulation of this pterosaur taking flight.
Chatterjee goes over the edge when he reports, “This would be very awkward-looking,” he said. “They’d have to run but also need a downslope, a technique used today by hang gliders. Once in the air, though, they were magnificent gliders.”
Unfortunately, Chatterjee, like the other pterosaur experts, has a built-in bias regarding pterosaurs in that he sees them too weak to run to take-off speed, except downhill, and too weak to flap sufficiently to create enough thrust without a runway, and too weak to flap with vigor while gaining altitude.
Living bipedal lizards are anything but awkward-looking.
In fact they look incredibly like graceful bullets, faster than a rabbit and impossible to see on film unless greatly slowed down, as shown here in the Bruce Jayne lab films.
