This winter researchers in Scotland report a remarkably complete fossil of a large pterosaur, dating to the Jurassic [3]. This animal is relatively early and relatively large compared to what is known of pterosaurs [2].
Which leads to a question: where did pterosaurs like to live? And as it happens, the same issue of Current Biology has an interesting survey of the paelogeography of dinosaurs [1].
First of all, with many thousands of fossils known from all over the world, there is enough data to look at these questions, at least for broad families of animals and plants. The data isn’t necessarily perfect, but there is enough to work with.
The second point is that the real question isn’t the contemporary geographic locations of the fossils. The important question is what the environment was like at the time the animals lived. The Scottish Pterosaur did not necessarily live in cool, wet, Scottish climate.
The study plotted fossils according to the paleolattitude of the find, i.e., how far north or south the animal’s remains were deposited. This data shows that non-sauropod dinosaurs expanded to the whole planet, including the poles. But sauropods were mainly restricted to 50 degrees north or south—tropical or sub-tropical.
This broad sketch was reinforced with a study of the hypothesized paleo climate for the locations. These models indicate that the sauropods lived in hotter and drier areas, while other dinosaurs spread to almost every niche. In fact, sauropods are particularly abundant and diverse in the southern Gondwana continent, which had vast areas of tropical inlands—likely hot and dry. They are also apparently absent from polar regions.
So, it looks like the prototypical ‘brontosaurus’ really liked warm, dry places. This might be due to physiological or behavioral factors, such as what they ate. Or they might have been outcompeted in higher lattitudes by other herbivores. Or something else.
And, back to the first question, where pterosaurs lived. This study doesn’t specifically consider pterosaurs, and I’m not sure how many pterosaurs are in these samples, if any. But they are ‘not sauropods’, so they are likely found everywhere.
Of course, many pterosaurs seem to have been specialized, e.g., fish catchers that nested near water. So they probably had a complicated geographical distribution related to bodies of water and coastlines, not just general regions or lattitudes.
On the other hand, flying animals can have very large ranges in their lifespan, even migrating vast distances seasonally. So the geography of pterosaurs could be really complicated, as complicated as contemporary birds.
It might be interesting to use the methods in this paper to take a look at pterosaurs, no?
- Emma Dunne, Paleobiogeography: Why some sauropods liked it hot. Current Biology, 32 (3):R120-R123, 2022/02/07/ 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221017395
- Victoria Gill, Fossil of largest Jurassic pterosaur found on Skye, in BBC News – Science & Environment, February 21, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60407928
- Natalia Jagielska, Michael O’Sullivan, Gregory F. Funston, Ian B. Butler, Thomas J. Challands, Neil D. L. Clark, Nicholas C. Fraser, Amelia Penny, Dugald A. Ross, Mark Wilkinson, and Stephen L. Brusatte, A skeleton from the Middle Jurassic of Scotland illuminates an earlier origin of large pterosaurs. Current Biology, 2022/02/22/ 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222200135X
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