Part 2: Wings Do Not a Bird Make
She sells seashells down by the seashore.
-Traditional tongue twister about Mary Anning
The grey waves wash over the rocky shores near Lyme Regis, England, as Mary Anning, clad in a warm, woolen dress and bonnet, picks her way slowly along the coast. The chilly December air sends a shiver through her bones, as she slowly, methodically looks for the skeletons of other creatures long gone. Her loyal black and white spaniel, Tray, trots at her heels, accompanying her on yet another adventure at the foot of the towering cliffs.
The winter storm the night before has washed away much of the sand, leaving behind the flat slabs and tide pools strewn with many smaller rocks and boulders. Mary knows this is the best time to look for fossils. In the decade that she has been searching for “curiosities,” as fossils were known in the early 1800s, she has made some staggering scientific discoveries, including finding some of the first specimens of Icthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus – massive marine (sea-dwelling) reptiles. She has little hope of one of these great, but rare, finds this morning, and is looking instead for the far more common shells and ammonite spirals.
Today, though, her luck strikes again as she spies a long, fragile bone, peeking out of the slab floor from under a clutter of pebbles and small rocks. She quickly bends down, brushing away the debris to reveal several more jumbled bones. Mary has seen many fossils in her time as an amateur paleontologist, but these look like none she has seen before. Leaving Tray to keep vigil over the spot (lest she never find it again on the ever-changing beaches), she hurries home to get the tools necessary to remove this large specimen. Mary Anning has found the first skeleton of a pterosaur (flying reptile) in England.
Alongside the more famous dinosaurs that roamed the land, the marine and flying reptiles once filled the sky and ocean but are now extinct (none of them are still living). Like their living relatives, dinosaurs and extinct marine reptiles had four legs (although some walked on two feet or had flippers fit for the ocean), laid eggs, and had teeth and scaly skin. Most modern reptiles are carnivores or omnivores, but most dinosaurs were herbivores to take advantage of the abundance of plants at that time.
The flying reptiles were similar to birds in that they had wings and two feet, as well as lightweight but strong bones and beak-like mouths. So why were they not birds? Flying reptiles had no feathers, but skin that stretched between the bones of their wings, allowing them to fly much like modern bats. Additionally, all of the known flying reptiles were carnivores, but many birds, of course, are herbivores or omnivores (think of the seeds that you put in the bird feeder in your backyard), living alongside fewer carnivores. Early paleontologists, many of them untrained, discovered some of these amazing creatures so that we can still know about them today through their hard work and enterprising spirits.
