Deep TimeLife & Evolution

Quetzalcoatlus, giant of the skies

68 million years agoNotable

Quetzalcoatlus, a giraffe-tall pterosaur with a wingspan of about 10 m, stalks the floodplains of Late Cretaceous Texas.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First atomic nuclei form → First stars ignite → First galaxies assemble → Milky Way takes shape → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Ediacaran biota → Cloudina, first shells and first predators → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Lobe-finned fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Pterosaurs take to the air → Quetzalcoatlus, giant of the skies

The story

Quetzalcoatlus northropi, named by Douglas Lawson in 1975 after the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, is one of the largest flying animals known. Lawson, a student, found its wing bone in Big Bend National Park in Texas in 1971. Wingspan estimates run from about 10 to 11 m, its head stood at about the height of a giraffe, and it weighed perhaps 200 to 250 kg. It lived about 68 to 66 million years ago and was one of the last of its kind.

Mark Witton and Darren Naish proposed in 2008 that Quetzalcoatlus was mostly a land hunter, walking on all fours on its folded wings and stabbing small dinosaurs and other prey with a long toothless beak, like a giant stork. Wing bones were hollow and thin-walled, and the animal was still able to fly, but probably used thermals to cover long distances. The azhdarchid pterosaurs to which it belonged had long necks and were found throughout the Late Cretaceous.

Why it mattered

Quetzalcoatlus set the upper limit for the size of flying animals.
It shows that pterosaurs remained diverse and giant almost to the end of the Cretaceous.
Its feeding style, on land, challenged older ideas of pterosaurs as seabird-like fishers.