My favorite Jurassic critters (pub. November 22, 2024)

There were no races, rest week after the half-marathon.

When you think of the Jurassic you think of dinosaurs, in fact, only dinosaurs appear in the films of that series. These animals have always captured our imagination. 

But my favorite Jurassic critters weren't dinosaurs.

When I was a child, in the house of Niño Jesús (that's the name of the street in Mexico City where my house was) there was a collection of books, a small children's encyclopedia called “My First Knowledge.” In it I encountered pterosaurs for the first time, with the knowledge of that time the books described them, fleshy wings with folds that joined the extremities to the body. I remember the book said that they were gliding animals, since with their great weight and size it would be impossible for them to take flight. It explained that these animals lived in areas of cliffs from which they could jump to plan and fish. I was a child, but it sounded absurd to me; The amount of energy they would expend every time they had to climb to the edge of the cliff would have to be enormous.

Pterosaurs were the first flying vertebrates, the most surprising that have ever existed, their reign in the air was in the Jurassic. It's a shame we didn't get to meet them; They must have been spectacular animals. 

After having read about them in my childhood, as time went by, a great diversity of pterosaurs appeared in the fossil record, from small to very large, VERY BIG. Some of them, such as those of the genus Quetzalcoatlus, with wingspans of up to 12 meters; That's almost the size of an executive jet. But even so, some “experts” continued saying that it was impossible for these animals to take flight. Until someone thought that they didn't have to take off, like today's birds or bats, by flicking their wings. It was then that a more complete study of the fossilized skeletons was done and it was found that the mechanics of starting flight were totally different from that of birds and bats: they did not take flight with the force of their wings, but rather they did so a jump that allowed very large animals to take flight. 

Today, we are amazed by the beauty and magnificence of birds; I think that the pterosaurs must have been much more impressive. Many times, while I am on my terrace, or in the pool, and a vulture passes by, I think about pterosaurs, I imagine that at that moment, instead of the vulture, a pterosaur passes over me, with a distance between the tip of its wings of more than 10 meters. The largest vultures, at most, have a wingspan of one and a half meters. Quetzalcoatlus had eight times that.

THEY MUST HAVE BEEN FANTASTIC ANIMALS.