Tiny tracks reveal pterosaur landed like a duck Paleontology

BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE. This undated handout illustration shows a pterosaur walking on all four of its feet. A team of scientists, including a noted UC Berkeley paleontologist, has discovered the tracks that one small pterosaur made as it landed on the muddy shore of an ancient sea sometime between 150 million and 115 million years ago. The tracks, "tell us that this animal must have flapped its wings with its body upright, stalled in the air like many waterbirds do, and landed feet first just the way flying ducks like mergansers do today," said UC Berkeley professor Kevin Padian. less BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE. This undated handout illustration shows a pterosaur walking on all four of its feet. A team of scientists, including a noted UC Berkeley paleontologist, has discovered the tracks that ... more Photo: Courtesy J-M Mazin Photo: Courtesy J-M Mazin Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Tiny tracks reveal pterosaur landed like a duck 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

They flew like ducks and they landed like ducks, but they were never like ducks at all.

They were flying reptiles called pterosaurs with long, sharp beaks and wings for soaring. They lived in the days of their distant cousins, the dinosaurs, but evolved separately until they went extinct 65 million years ago - along with the dinosaurs and most other creatures of the time.

For the first time, a team of scientists, including a noted UC Berkeley paleontologist, has discovered the tracks that one small pterosaur made as it landed on the muddy shore of an ancient sea sometime between 150 million and 115 million years ago.

That gently sloping shore is now a broad stretch of flat rock known as Pterosaur Beach in a limestone quarry near the tiny village of Crayssac in southwestern France. It's so far off the tourist routes that it has no hotel or inn, so Kevin Padian, the Berkeley scientist who has studied pterosaur fossils for more than 25 years, and his French and Swiss colleagues slept at the local school while there to investigate the newfound tracks.

The scientists' work is being published in the British journal called Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Much is known about pterosaurs - think pterodactyls - and members of the extended tribe varied in wingspread, ranging in size from sparrow to fighter plane. But until now it was not known how they landed after flying far in search of prey. Padian has already determined from analyzing pterosaur fossil skeletons that they could run fast on their hind legs, and more slowly on all fours, with their clawed wingtips acting as front feet.

"These tracks," Padian said, "tell us that this animal must have flapped its wings with its body upright, stalled in the air like many waterbirds do, and landed feet first just the way flying ducks like mergansers do today. Then, its newfound tracks show this pterosaur took a few short, stuttering steps, turned slightly to its left, and there the tracks stop."

The first prints of the landing show long claw marks made as the flier apparently dug in its hind feet to stop. By the second step, two prints of the animal's forefeet show up for the first time, according to the forthcoming report.

The French quarry holds hundreds of tracks made by pterosaurs as well as prints made by long-gone turtles, the ancestors of crocodiles and even dinosaurs. Heavier animals probably stepped through the surface crust of the mud, and those prints were lost, Padian said.

More than 30 of the intact tracks showing the passage of lighter pterosaurs have been carefully analyzed, but only one - the first ever discovered - revealed the precious trackway of the pterosaur's complete landing. Its hind feet, the tracks show, were about 2 inches long, and the wingspread was about 3 feet, Padian said.

Although the discovery reveals much about the evolution of flight in the first vertebrate animals to reach the air, the scientists conclude that nothing in the tracks they have studied so far "provides any indication how these animals took off."

Padian's colleagues are Jean-Michel Mazin of the University of Lyon and the French National Center for Scientific Research, and Jean-Paul Billon-Buryat of the archaeology and paleontology section in the cultural office of the Canton of Jura in Porrentruy, Switzerland.