Small Cretaceous pterosaurs discovered

This video says about itself:

25 July 2014

Pterosaurs (/ˈtɛrɵsɔr/, from the Greek πτερόσαυρος, pterosauros, meaning “winged lizard”) were flying reptiles of the clade or order Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period (228 to 66 million years ago).

Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight. Their wings were formed by a membrane of skin, muscle, and other tissues stretching from the ankles to a dramatically lengthened fourth finger. Early species had long, fully toothed jaws and long tails, while later forms had a highly reduced tail, and some lacked teeth. Many sported furry coats made up of hair-like filaments known as pycnofibers, which covered their bodies and parts of their wings. Pterosaurs spanned a wide range of adult sizes, from the very small Nemicolopterus to the largest known flying creatures of all time, including Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx.

From Science News:

Pterosaurs weren’t all super-sized in the Late Cretaceous

Some of the flying reptiles were smaller than a bald eagle

By Meghan Rosen

7:00am, September 12, 2016

Pterosaurs didn’t have to be gargantuan to survive in the Late Cretaceous.

Fragmentary fossils of a roughly 77-million-year-old pterosaur found in British Columbia suggest it had a wingspan of just 1.5 meters, about a quarter that of a bald eagle.

Bald eagles have wingspans of about two meters. So, the newly discovered pterosaus were smaller than bald eagles; but not four times smaller.

The ancient flier is the smallest pterosaur discovered during this time period — by a lot, report paleontologist Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone of the University of Southampton in England and colleagues August 30 in Royal Society Open Science.

Dozens of larger pterosaurs, some with wings spanning more than 10 meters (nearly the length of a school bus), have been unearthed. But until now, scientists had found only two small-scale versions, with wingspans 2.5 to 3 meters long, from the period stretching from 66 million to 100 million years ago.

Some scientists blamed competition with birds for the scarcity of little flying reptiles. Researchers have proposed that, “the only way pterosaurs could survive was by evolving completely crazy massive sizes,” Martin-Silverstone says.

The new find, she says, may mean that, “pterosaurs were doing better than we thought.”