The new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (the one in New York City) doesn't seem to make sense. How could something that big -- even if it is a dinosaur -- fly? Taller than a giraffe with a similar build, the largest pterosaurs weighed up to 660 pounds and had a wingspan of 33 feet. Not only did they become the first vertebrates to achieve flight 220 million years ago, but they're also the largest living things ever to leave the ground.
The pterosaur is probably the closest thing to a classic, non-comodo dragon the planet (while humans exist on it) will ever see. Though not every one of their kind grew to mammoth proportions, the ones that did got there -- and were able to maintain their flying powers -- because of three key characteristics, according to Yahoo's article: wing anatomy, hollow bones, and muscle power.
Other flyers like bats had some combination of the three. No other flying animal, however, has had all of them like the pterosaur, according to Michael Habib, who studies biomechanics at the University of Southern California and is involved with the exhibit.
"Bats have the right launch system, but they don't have pneumatic [air-filled] bones. Birds have pneumatized bones, but they don't have the right launch system, and they don't have as high a lift coefficient [for their] wings," Habib told Live Science. "Pterosaurs are the only ones by happenstance that ended up with those three things."
The exhibition "Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs" runs from April 5 until January 4 and has a host of neat features, Yahoo reported. Visitors can examine fossils of the dinosaurs' eggs and foot prints, see for the first ever in the United States a 150-million-year-old preserved tissue of its wing, or virtually navigate a pterosaur in flight.
