B Griffin
Constraining pterosaur launch: range of motion in the pectoral and pelvic girdles of a medium-sized ornithocheiraean pterosaur
Griffin, B; Martin-Silverstone, E; Demuth, O; Pegas, R; Palmer, C; Rayfield, E
Authors
E Martin-Silverstone
O Demuth
R Pegas
C Palmer
E Rayfield
Abstract
Launch is the most energetically expensive part of flight and is considered a limiting factor in the size of modern flyers. Pterosaurs reached significantly larger sizes than modern flyers and are proposed to have launched either bipedallly or quadrupedally. We investigated the ability of a medium-sized ornithocheiraean pterosaur to assume the poses required to launch bipedally or quadrupedally. We applied range of motion (ROM) mapping methodology to the pectoral and pelvic girdles to identify viable poses at varying levels of appendicular cartilage based on the extant phylogenetic bracket. The ROMs were constrained by novel triangulated minimum stretch methodology, used to identify the restraining tissue ROM. Our study indicates that a medium-sized ornithocheiraean could assume the poses required to use a quadrupedal launch and, with an additional 10 degrees of hindlimb abduction, a bipedal launch, although further analysis is required to determine whether sufficient muscular power and leverage was available to propel the animal into the air.
Citation
Griffin, B., Martin-Silverstone, E., Demuth, O., Pegas, R., Palmer, C., & Rayfield, E. (2022). Constraining pterosaur launch: range of motion in the pectoral and pelvic girdles of a medium-sized ornithocheiraean pterosaur. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 137(2), 250-266. https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blac063
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | May 2, 2022 |
Online Publication Date | Aug 20, 2022 |
Publication Date | 2022 |
Deposit Date | Aug 8, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | Aug 8, 2023 |
Print ISSN | 0024-4066 |
Electronic ISSN | 1095-8312 |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 137 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 250-266 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blac063 |
Keywords | biomechanics; flight; launch; palaeontology; pterosaur; range of motion; BODY-MASS; EVOLUTION; FLIGHT; BIOMECHANICS; VECTIDRACO; LIGAMENT; MYOLOGY; MODEL |
Files
Constraining pterosaur launch: range of motion in the pectoral and pelvic girdles of a medium-sized ornithocheiraean pterosaur
(4.5 Mb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Version
VoR
Downloadable Citations
About RVC Repository
Administrator e-mail: publicationsrepos@rvc.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search