#Quetzalcoatlus northropi

[toaarcan]

You ever think about how incredibly weird Azhdarchids were?

Like, they had huge heads, very long necks, relatively small wings that they could nonetheless fly with, which they (probably) achieved by pole-vaulting themselves into the air with their bones. They could likely get around on land by galloping like horses, and probably ate anything that they could fit in The Beak, like pelicans.

Also they were this big.

Sincerely, what the fuck.

[confusedhadrosaur]

Artfight attack for @jurassicjerks

[assasinationbycarscoveredinhamrs]

These graphics from Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong Quetzalcoatlus episode are so funny out of context

Like:

[GIF ID: A paper animation that shows a pterosaurus from the genre Jeholopterus that then pans to Quetzalcoatlus Northropi being behind it. The size difference is ridiculously big. A speech bubble appears showing the word "Howdy" as being said by the Quetzalcoatlus | End ID]

HOWDY

[GIF ID: A paper animation of the pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus Northropi. It's head is being scaled up until it gets so big that the pterosaus flops and lands on its neck in a ragdoll-like manner with its hindlimbs dangling in the air]

Me when I come home from my nine to five job

[GIF ID: A paper animation that shows a speculative way that the pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus Northopi might have fed. The animation has very few frames and shows the prehistoric animal spotting and its prey, wich is represented by a little red ball, raising the prey up with its beak to swallow it and returning to its neutral position in a very fast paced way.]

Big Chickem

This is the Video btw, 100% recommended to all of the paleontology nerds:

[yourfavoritehouseplant]

Feathered Serpent

[beaudesoleil]

oh quetzalcoatlus northropi they can never make me hate you

[honmyoseagull]

Gentle reminder that these 'birdies' must have been huge and scary. The metal bar here reached to my waist. The ground level were the bones stand was way below the level of my feet. and look how tall. (Yeah, that was my favorite skeleton of the whole museum, though.)

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.

[smile-files]

i'm trying to do some speculative biology stuff on how dragons could exist: provided i'm thinking of the typical hexapod/six-limbed dragon (four legs and two wings), however, i have to contrive reasons for how the extra set of limbs would arise on a quadruped, and how they'd function (wyvern dragons are much easier to envision, as they're just scarier pterodactyls); i'm also curious as to how dragons would behave given their anatomy. assorted thoughts below...

for one thing, i instantly imagined dragons evolving from dinosairs. i was thinking of some sort of conjoined/parasitic twin mutation common to the dragon species which would add the extra wings, but that idea rested on one twin having the wing-limbs to contribute to the wingless dominant twin, which apparently would be impossible as all conjoined twins are identical (which is pretty obvious now that i think about it). i should still keep the conjoined twins idea in my back pocket, though, so there could be hydras!

maybe the extra limbs would just be a product of polymelia, specifically notomelia... as it is, though, i'm wondering how the mutant extra limbs would evolve into wings fast enough that the mutation could even persist in the population: the presence of the extra limbs would likely be a hinderance for as long as they aren't actively beneficial, after all. maybe i can look into how pterodactyl and archaeopteryx wings evolved to get a sense of how that occurred: for them, too, any evolutionary stage at the midpoint between leg and wing would likely have not been specialized enough in either direction to be helpful, so the transition must've been quick/direct and therefore a product of a single large mutation with subsequent refinements. for dragons, i could imagine two stages, with a simpler, smaller wing evolving in a quick first pass -- giving the animal more air time when leaping -- and a second stage of the wings enlarging to provide the capacity for real flight. (either way i'd imagine that dragons, like birds and mammals, would initially be very small and only evolve to their maximum size after the extinction of the dinosaurs.) i'd have to look more into the occurrence of notomelia and what causes it (does it even occur in reptiles/dinosaurs?), to see how realistic it would be for it to occur commonly within a species and produce fully-functioning limbs.

i'm picturing dragons as carnivorous, meaning they'd likely evolve from theropods: this would make sense, given theropods' hollow bones, as well as their evolutionary proximity to birds. with that in mind, having the wings as an extra set of limbs would be especially beneficial, as all four of the animal's legs could be maintained: the hindlegs for running, and the forelegs for grasping (these would necessarily not be tiny like a t-rex's). also, the idea of feathered dragons is a very fun one: imagine the vivid colors and patterns they could have!

in terms of size, we tend to picture dragons as very large -- however, i'd have to keep in mind that the larger the animal, the harder it will be to maintain lift and fly efficiently, especially if the animal in question has more than four limbs to carry in addition to its body. there have been some genuinely huge flying reptiles and birds in existence, such as quetzalcoatlus northropi (~35 ft wingspan, 440-550 lbs weight) and pelagornis sandersi (~20 ft wingspan, 48-44 lbs weight) -- and these awesome animals were able to fly, despite being so massive! there are several factors that would contribute to this, including the giant wingspan and hollow bones. because of the weight of the extra limbs, i doubt a hexapod dragon could grow quite as massive as quetzalcoatlus and still be able to fly well, though i still think it would be possible for them to be very large; it's worth mentioning, too, that having four legs to power liftoff would make it more viable for a dragon to take to the skies at all.

in myth, dragons often breathe fire; i don't think i could manage to find a reasonable biological means of that evolving, though perhaps dragons could evolve to spit venom, which would be a more realistic means of delivering a ranged, burning attack. in flight, the dragon could take down its prey by targeting it with venom, then quickly snatch it up with its forelegs to eat without ever alighting. sounds evolutionarily beneficial to me: very efficient, and very awesome.

tying into the trope of a greedy dragon's hoard, perhaps dragons are especially keen to shiny objects, which they can see from afar: with this mid-flight grasping maneuver, they'd snatch them up to add to a bowerbird-like nest decorated with "treasure". to connect more with myth, dragons are often associated with weather, storms in particular; perhaps dragons migrate at high altitudes during rainy seasons, creating that correlation.

it should be noted, too, that the reality in which i'm picturing these dragons is one in which humans also exist. these humans, witnessing the behaviors of these awe-inspiring creatures, would tell stories about them: they breathe fire (they spit venom), and they abduct children (they snatch up their prey in their claws), and they steal treasure from kings (they take shiny things for their nests), and they control the weather (they migrate during the rainy season). perhaps humans aren't their main prey source, causing dragons to be a fear but not a genuine threat to humans (like how we view sharks); or perhaps dragons indeed regularly eat humans, meaning humans have to live out of sight of them. in the latter case, considering how dragons are highly effective predators, they might drive humans towards extinction!

i hope you enjoyed my spec-bio ramble on the evolution, physiology, and behavior of dragons! it's very fun to think about :)

[doomyte]

Quetzalcoatlus northropi

[harpagornis]

Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni by corvarts. Unlike it's larger relative Q. northropi, which occurs in plains deposits, Q. lawsoni occurs exclusively in alkaline salt lake deposits. This seems to hint at a flamingo-like lifestyle, perhaps having displaced ctenochasmatoids in this regard.

[saritawolff]

I forgot to post this here, so here’s my Q. northropi as a comparison

#Archovember Day 28 - Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni

While most people now know of the giraffe-sized Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the smaller species deserves much more credit. Most of what we know about the giant Q. northropi comes from lawsoni: northropi is known only from cervical vertebrae and some fragments of wing. We have filled in the rest using the anatomy of the smaller species, Q. lawsoni, of which much more material is known. For years Q. lawsoni wasn’t even named (as it was uncertain whether it was a juvenile or a seperate species). It was just known as Quetzalcoatlus sp. or “the smaller Quetzalcoatlus”. Finally, northropi was determined to be an adult and a separate species from northropi, and recieved a name in late 2021.

Even if it wasn’t the size of a giraffe, Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni was still a large, formidable azhdarchid! It had an estimated wingspan of 5 m (16 ft), body length of 3.5 m (11 ft), body mass of 65 kg (143 lb), and a long, sharp, pointed beak. It was native to Late Cretaceous North America, particularly Texas, where it coexisted with the other azhdarchid Wellnhopterus. It has been suggested that Quetzalcoatlus would have filled a similar niche to the modern Marabou Stork: a terrestrial scavenger and predator of small animals that could still fly in a pinch. Having unique fore and hindlimb proportions, Quetzalcoatlus seems adapted to a terrestrial lifestyle, and was even capable of “galloping.”

Alongside fellow azhdarchids Wellnhopterus and its larger cousin Q. northropi, Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni lived alongside the titanosaur Alamosaurus, the ceratopsids Bravoceratops and Torosaurus, the hadrosaurs Kritosaurus and Saurolophinae, the dromaeosaur Saurornitholestes, the troodontid Troodon, and of course, the tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus rex. It would have fed on a variety of small mammals, reptiles, and perhaps even birds and their eggs.

[tyrannoninja]

Hell Creek Bayou

This is my representation of a bayou in the Hell Creek region of western North America between 68 and 66 million years ago, near the end of the Late Cretaceous Period. This region straddles what are now states of Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota, but back then had a humid and semitropical climate more similar to modern Florida or Louisiana. Among the animals you can see in this illustration are the ceratopsian Triceratops prorsus, the tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus rex, a pterosaur related to Quetzalcoatlus northropi, and the eusuchian crocodyliform Borealsuchus sternbergii.

[anyonghalimaw]

new design up for sale! quetzalcoatlus northropi based on the great hornbill (buceros bicornis). 8 usd via paypal invoice.

willing to hold 1 week max! dm to claim

[housecow]

Hi, I just want to say I love your content and I'd absolutely buy you food and would love more pictures of you. However, im new to your state and I want to learn about the geology of it! Any fun facts you can share?

thank you omggg 🥺🥺 TX is forever the best state imo hehe

however. as for fun facts, i’m more knowledgeable on specifically paleontology so i hope this is interesting… idk if you’re a fan of national parks, but Big Bend NP out in west texas has the most complete and uninterrupted series of fossiliferous strata in the national park system!! specifically, it preserves formations from the early Cretaceous to the Eocene, about 100 million years or so, from 145ma to ~43ma.

another fun fact—quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest pterosaur and largest flying organism to ever live (dating back 67 million years to the maastrichtian javelina formation iirc), was found out in Big Bend!! in many ways, everything’s bigger in TX :3

^^the dude in question, these things were HUGE. 11-12 meter (~36 feet) wingspan!!!

[alleenickel]

This is what Quetzalcoatlus northropi looked like, btw. Reconstruction by @bluerhinostudio.

Someone with a different flavor of autism than me please tell me what the fuck Quetzalcoatlus was doing. Why does it look like that. What possible evolutionary pressures created this fucking anatomical disaster. It looks like it would have gotten me suicide baited if I posted it on deviantArt in 2011. What the fuck was it and why does literally nothing else ever as far as I know have hardly even remotely the same body structures.

[bunjywunjy]

Sorry I’m dumb they’re not birds. They’re the Hatzegopteryx and Quetzalcoatlus northropi

How was I supposed to remember those names anyway😔💔

that type of pterosaur is called an azhdarchid it if helps

(it doesn't! gesundheit.)

[xanderomeister]

@nnicknnelsonn here with a request: Have you ever tried turning your favorite characters into dinosaur or dragon caricatures? I saw your Q about @narlieweek and now all I can think about is

What kind of dinosaurs would Nick and Charlie be?

And Elle. And Tau. And and and.

Oh my god. Brainsploding.

(Obviously Harry would be the 🦖 )

Possibly too long of a reply:

I actually gave a crack at this with Heartstopper already, though I am considering major tweaks. I've settled on a few though.

Tao is Quetzalcoatlus. Not a dinosaur by technicality, but closely associated.

(I'm likely to repeat the slap-on hairstyles to varying degrees because I think it can look funny)

The larger and smaller species of Quetzalcoatlus also fit the eldritch height shift I heard about...

Yes, Quetzalcoatlus northropi is indeed one of the largest flying animals to exist. It's tied with various close relatives in wingspan, though Hatzegopteryx is heavier.

Either way, it's kinda silly, but it works. And this is the largest flying animal of all time we're talking about, that's a cool claim to have.

Onto Tyrannosaurus rex. Harry is not T. rex, Isaac is. Why? Prehistoric Planet. The T. rex in some scenes really captures his vibe, I feel.

(I strongly suggest watching Prehistoric Planet btw)

Big, calm and approachable are the main things that come to mind here. Maybe a bit quiet, too, though not unfriendly.

To complete the circle, going with other well-known dinosaurs would be a good idea. I think Deinonychus is fitting for Charlie. I am considering Spinosaurus for Elle. I'm not sure if it has too strong of a metaphorical angle though.

Nick is... probably a largeish UK theropod. Neovenator is a present top pick. I'm thinking of these more typical dinosaurs as a contrast to the more unusual/derived ones.

I am unsure about what Tara and Darcy would be. I thought of Iguanodon or Cetiosaurus for Imogen, but these are moreso suggestions. Many of the other characters I am completely clueless on.

Onto Harry: I think Altispinax suits him because its named from a small chunk of its spine. It's like his personality (near nonexistent).

Final words on design: Dinosaurs in general are an odd bunch, mostly due general unfamiliarity. Many are simply weird to look at, but I think it has to be embraced. Their differentness is a major part of their appeal.

Because of this I find find nailing the right degree of anthropomorphism a little difficuly. Dinosaurs can have pretty distinct sillhouettes and various details which I do want to keep, but this also makes interactions with items, esp. clothing, clunkier. This is stuff I am likely to tweak about with.