Re: Pterosaur diversity (was: Re: Waimanu)

[Roberto Takata <rmtakata@gmail.com>]

On 5/30/06, Michael Habib <mhabib5@jhmi.edu> wrote:
> could be a factor, sure, but there are plenty of reasons to get
> directed selection for large body size.  The flight dynamics of
> pterosaurs would have encouraged large size, for example.
> Populations may have become large because larger size
> was advantageous in and of itself, rather than because birds
> caused a global extinction of small pterosaurs.

Interestingly, the Cope's rule apply well to other archosaurs -
particularly dinosaurian - taxa too.

It seems that there was a trend to gigantism in ornithopoda,
ceratosauria, pachycephalosauria, sauropoda, coelurosauria and
crocodylia.

Fortunately today there is no such thing like _Quetzalcoatlus_ flying
above us - it would be a hard time to clean the car after parking
bellow a tree on which a bunch of gigantic pterosaur was hanging down.

[]s,

Roberto Takata