This is a map of our planet during the late Cretaceous,
when giant dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Anyway, let's say I'm here.
Hateg island, Present-day, Romania.
I want to get to North America to see my favourite dinosaur.
Even though the Atlantic is much smaller, swimming is not recommended.
The only option therefore is flight.
Oh, we're in the south of France and here's a paleo museum.
so let's go have a look. And I walked in and they have
a Quetzalcoatlus skeleton, a cast standing to full height.
And I just stared at it and just was like: 'What is this animal?
I don't understand. How did that thing fly?'
And it was kind of my first time ever seeing a giant pterosaur. You know,
you see them in books and in papers and stuff and you can see a scale.
But until I actually stood in front of it, I didn't really
understand how big they really were. And that was kind of when
I thought: 'I want to work on those.
Those are weird. How did that fly?
How did it do anything?' And that's kind of where I went from there.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to master flight. They're not dinosaurs,
but closely related. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes,
from tiny bat things to giant fliers the size of a small airplane.
Azhdarchidaes are these big, generally big pterosaurs that are known
for having these very long necks.
They have no tail and their heads are just ridiculously big for the
rest of their body, which is quite characteristic of that group.
And you reckon if they flew we could ride one?
I think it would be pretty difficult,
but I think I would love to.
I know that it's not very scientific, but we've been thinking this end of how you would ride
an Azhdarchidae and so I'm going to share my screen and show you some thoughts
and maybe you can comment on the likeliness of this working at all.
All right. So, this saddle is called the the blue Pegasus.
It's a very standard saddle – is primarily inspired by stuff like Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon.
That's like, you sort of ride it like a horse. Would it work?
So, if you're sitting upright on the back of a pterosaur
that's not very streamlined at all. And, you know, pterosaurs,
they have this like needlepoint head and their wings are all designed
to be as efficient as possible and have as little drag as possible.
And then you stick something, that's like a giant –
it's almost like a sail on the front of it or like sitting on its neck, right.
You just stick that up and that's just going
to completely slow it right down.
But they could moderate their own drags, right?
You can see the kind of little bone that sticks out the front called the
pteroid and that is used to move that front bit of wing up and down, which
helps like the angle of attack. So, that's one thing that it would use.
And it could also use the like actinofibrils – these structures within
the wings that actually allowed it to change the shape a little bit.
Like, if it's coming in to land, you make it more like rounded,
so there's a bit more drag and increases the likelihood of stalling.
But, it's still a problem if there's suddenly something
that it's not used to having there, creating extra drag.
All right, fine. So we're going to ditch this one.
We're going to move on to the next one, it's called the glider.
And essentially, well, he's underneath now.
And he's got a little, maybe like a baby carrier thing.
So, that would reduce a bit of drag no? From just underneath?
Yeah, I mean, it would reduce a little bit.
I think there'd still be a bit of extra drag.
One of my big questions with that is – how does that pterosaur
get into the air if it's got something attached to its belly?
How did they launch? What is it, is it like birds, right?
They just flap their wings?
So, we've kind of moved on from a bird launch,
and now we think that they were launching quadrupedally.
So we know that they walked on all fours.
So they they were actually walking around with their, like,
the little fingers stick out from the wings would be on the ground.
And what we now think is that they were actually using those arms to
kind of pole vault. They sort of push themselves off of the ground.
It's called a ballistic launch, so they can use the power from there,
like ligaments and muscles, to push off the ground using their forelimbs.
The advantage of that is that you can really focus all of the muscle into just the the pectoral girdle.
And you don't have to worry about the legs because they're not launching.
So they're not quite as important.
I love it. So it's like the strategy to reduce weight in some way?
Yeah, because with birds, what you end up having is quite a
lot of muscles obviously for flight, but they also have to have really
good leg muscles because they need to be able to get off the ground.
And so, once you get off the ground, those leg muscles are dead weight.
They don't do anything in the air. Whereas with pterosaurs, with this
strategy, you're focusing it into one area and really use it both ways.
I mean, I think it's a far better design.
I don't know what evolution was thinking with birds.
So, we don't think this could work? You think it's a bad
idea because you might smash your face in the ground?
Yeah, I think that would be pretty painful trying
to get off the ground with that.
All right, fine. So the glider is gone. This is the last and final one.
So this one's inspired to reduce drag is, I think, the best thought out one.
It was straight out of Dinotopia – I don't know
if you've ever read Dinotopia? So what do we think here?
Is this is this a goer? I think it's the best of the three for sure.
There aren't the same sort of obvious, you know, really high drag,
no problems with getting in the way of the wings or the launch.
But the thing that I can think of and, I mean this does apply to all three,
is just the adding of the extra weight to the animal.
So, these are animals that are made to reduce their mass, as
much as possible. They have more air sacks than just the lungs.
They also have air sacs that go into their body.
And in some cases, they actually will invade the bones. And this
makes them full of air rather than being full of bone marrow.
So especially in larger pterosaurs, they are really quite heavily pneumatized.
So you're looking at something like 90 percent of the bone would've
been full of air. How did it not break? Yeah, yeah. That's a good question.
So it makes them very resistant to bending and compression.
So the problem would be that they would not be very resistant to
like impact. So if you punched it, it would probably be a problem.
OK, so I won't be punching my hatzegopteryx. Yeah, don't punch it.
Also, it would probably stab you.
Yeah, exactly. So the problem is that I weigh too much.
What if I was a child? Would child be able to ride it?
I think a small child might be able to certainly
more likely than most adults,
but they'd have to be able to hold on to it.
The health and safety issues – we'll iron those out before the release.
Yeah, man, I'm just stuck in Romania it's the Cretaceous,
I'm never going to leave. It's not the worst place to be to be.
All right. I'm going to go back to the drawing board.
I'm sorry.
All right. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me. It's fun.