London: Pterosaurs, the largest known flying reptiles that roamed the earth some 65 million years ago, were light and fragile creatures best suited for catching rising air to soar, a new study has found.
The ancient reptiles that existed at the time of dinosaurs were incredibly at their best in flying high and landing slowly, found the new study.
"I wanted to understand how these animals flew, and as an engineer one of the first things you do is you measure the performance of the wing, and I realised no one had ever done that before," said Colin Palmer, a researcher in paleontology at England's University of Bristol.
According to Palmer, a former engineer who was once involved in yacht design, pterosaurs had wings composed of a flexible membrane reinforced with fibbers, and wingspans of up to 33 feet (10 meters), LiveScience reported.
He said a Pterosaur wing has the aerodynamic characteristics of the mainsail of a sailboat, with the equivalent of a ring finger forming the leading edge of much of the wing, but with no additional support for the membranous wing other than its attachment at the ankle.
Although scientists know from fossils that the wing was composed of a membrane, details were missing from the complete picture of wing anatomy, such as how far back the membrane extended behind the wing bone, Palmer said.
It is also not clear how much the wings curved in the plane parallel to the body, an aerodynamic property called camber.
For his research, Palmer tested a series of simplified cross-sections simulating possible shapes for the wing in a wind tunnel - a research tool used to study the movement of air as it passes around objects.
The resulting data indicated that pterosaurs experienced more drag than anticipated, and confirmed the previous theory that they were slow fliers.
"In order to fly at their best, they had to have quite a lot of camber in their wing membrane," Palmer said. "This means they fly at their best when they fly slowly."
This, in turn, indicates that they were best suited for calm tropical air, riding rising columns of air over coastlines and elsewhere.
While pterosaurs came in many species and in many sizes, down to that of a blackbird, Palmer geared his tests for a generic Pterosaur with a wingspan of about 6 meters (19.7 feet). His work is published in the journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Comments
0 comment