Pterosaurs were some of the coolest animals that ever lived. I mean, flying dinosaurs! Huge, dragonlike swoopers! Wow! How cool is that?
But, of course, we know very little about how they lived.
This winter researchers from several institutions in China report on a new fossil find of two small pterosaurs, an adult and a juvenile, plus two emetolites, i.e., gastric pellets [2]. Like owl pellets, these blobs are full of digested food, in this case from the pterosaurs’ last meals.
This is, as the title of the article says, the earliest evidence of antiperistalsis, i.e., barfing up pellets. And it shows that this anatomy and behavior seen in contemporary birds and mammals developed as long ago as the late Jurassic.
So what did these guys eat?
They ate fish. The investigators were able to identify the species, which appears to have been common at that time.
The each of the two emetolites is associated with one of the individuals, so we can also tell that the juvenile ate medium-sized specimens, and the adult ate larger fish. This suggests that they fed on the same species throughout much of their life, taking larger prey as they got older.
I’ll note that this article appears in an issue of the journal dedicated to the topic, “The impact of Chinese palaeontology on evolutionary research”, along with eight other cool new finds from locations in China. This reflects the huge impact that exploration these relatively unexplored, fossil rich regions is having in the early twenty first.
- Asher Elbein, How 2 Pterosaurs’ Last Meals Ended Up in the Fossil Record, in New York Times. 2022: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/science/pterosaurs-pellets-food.html
- Shunxing Jiang, Xiaoli Wang, Xiaoting Zheng, Xin Cheng, Xiaolin Wang, Guangjin Wei, and Alexander W. A. Kellner, Two emetolite-pterosaur associations from the Late Jurassic of China: showing the first evidence for antiperistalsis in pterosaurs. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377 (1847) March 28 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0043
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