The broken wings of two young pterosaurs may reveal how hundreds of their kind met their end about 150 million years ago.
New analyses of the well-preserved, complete Pterodactylus fossils — dubbed “Lucky I” and “Lucky II” — show that a humerus bone in each hatchling had been cleanly fractured at an oblique angle. This indicates that their arms were wrenched in a powerful twisting motion, researchers report September 5 in Current Biology.
The culprit was probably a violent windstorm that proved too powerful for the young animals, say paleontologist Robert Smyth of the University of Leicester in England and his colleagues.
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