Scientist claims Pterodactyls were too heavy to fly

I'll wait for them to sort it out.

Seems to me someobody or other once proved that the aerodynamic involved make it quite impossible for bumblebees to get airborne. But, thankfully, bumblebees can't read. I suspect pterodactyls didn't know how to read either.

Knowing next to nothing about aerodynamics, the first thought that came to mind is: so are 747's.

Is it aerodynamically impossible for bumblebees to fly?

747's don't flap their wings with muscles, the calculations would be significantly different.

So.... the wing-flaps were for gliding, maybe?

Pteradactyls were around 50 lbs; the Big Bend pterosaurs were more like 1000 with 60' wingspans. The heaviest birds which can take off or land today are around 30 lbs. Think something might have changed or something?

The first of the OrderRhamphorhynchus was a Jurassic age "flying" reptile that , just like later pteronodons and the "Huge" versions of Pterodactyls, showed hollow bones, forward pointing teeth (presumably for grabbing pelagic sealife), very elongated humerii and radii/ulnae.
Several studies have been done that looked at the lift and glide ratios for a "model pteronodon" (The study looked at whether it could stay aloft, and it could) As all tge early and later derived flying reptiles show, they all have a grasping fingers at the pteroid bones and fingers on the manus. This appears to be adaptation for hanging to rocky cliffs or trees.
The shoulders of all the flying reptiles contain a special bone, the Notarium, which was a shoulder "girdle" that acted as a strenmgthening point for the shoulder. Other bones show adaptation for flying in pterodactyls and pteronodons. These two families show deepened sternal bones (like turkeys or flamingoes) , while Rhamphorhyncus, the earlier flying reptile, shows a smaller , less developed sternum.

Rhamphorhynchus clearly shows that it was an earlier state of the evolution of flying reptiles . The Rhamphorhync"oid" style of flying reptile were replaced by the pterosaur"oids" in the transition from Jurassic to Cretaceaous time.
Rhamphrhyncus did fly, and by morph similarity, so did the pterosaurs. I think that the scientist who stated his opinion should look at a fossil of an Albatross . These birds are terrible at getting into the air , but soar marvelously , sometimes for weeks at a time.
Many researchers have looked at similitude of form and function and evaluating convergence of this similitude among unrelated families(eg birds and bats, catii and bromeliads, etc)

Yeh, those big wings and hollow bones are probably just for show. They probably ran around on stubby little legs dragging their wings in the sand and snapping up fish that threw themselves onto the shore.

It's pretty clear that Prof Soto has underestimated the mechanics of this animal. I would guess that strapping an accelerometer onto a bird and extrapolating the results isn't a good way to understand Pterosaurs.

Yeah, if they couldn't fly they would have been helpless.

When Langston first tried to put Texas pterosaur skeletons together (along with man-made material sections for missing parts) he wanted to make the wings 60' in span because the bones he DID have indicated that. The aeronautical engineering department at UT basically told him something like "Hey, daddyo, you're making us look stupid enough putting those things together with 40' wingspans but we'll tolerate that; but no way in hell are we letting you put em together with 60' spans". In other words, they knew that the things were monsterously beyond what was mechanically possible for something made of flesh and bone.

And then within the last five years or thereabouts more complete specimens have turned up in Mexico and Israel which leave no doubt as to the 60' wingspans.

These things flew, but they clearly could not fly in our present world.

And they would have stopped having wings pretty damned fast.

Correct. In our present world, wings would become vestigial long before the creature ever got to 1000 lbs.

Or the atmosphere it lived in.

It's not atmosphere; probably gravity. An atmosphere thick enough to create buoyancy would burn the creature to cinders as he tried to breath it and snap his wings the first time he tried to hold them in a turn in it.

Yes. There are number of possibilities which simply can't be extrapolated from putting accelerometers on birds. Atmosphere is only one.

Gravity doesn't change.

The oxygen-rich theory is not about the density of the air but the physiological effect on the Pterosaurs.

Still doesn't work. If nothing else, bones don't depend on oxygen and the bones wouldn't take the stress.