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WWD: Uktenadactylus rodriguesae
🕑 Added 2023-05-16 09:02:17 +0000 UTCThis is the episode which will change mostly radically based on what we know now versus what we knew then. I think based on what we know it's the episode that showed its exact age the fastest. The explanation will be stretched out over the numerous various species, so let's start with the title character, the giant pterosaur Ornithocheirus.
It's fairly well-known now that the "Ornithocheirus" featured in the episode is actually now considered a member of the genus Tropeognathus and it was not quite as large as portrayed in the episode (under nine metres versus twelve metres). At the time, it was suggested the Tropeognathus was merely the male form of Ornithocheirus. Still, it was an enormous pterosaur, only known to have been exceeded in size by large azhdarchids. The reasons for these errors are due to a fact which plagues the series as a whole: the tendency to use dubious or unstudied fossil material as evidence for the animal portrayals. In this case, a giant pterosaur fossil which had not been examined in detail at the time of the show's production.
It was incredibly ambitious to have an episode centring around pterosaurs considering how little was known of them at the time (and even now). By modern standards, they are truly bizarre animals, and nothing like them exists anymore for comparison. They didn't know how such large flying animals even took off, how they foraged, how they walked, how their wings were positioned, what the membranes were made of, how they grew up, or how they reproduced. But they chose to show all of these anyway and just had to make their best educated assumptions. Unfortunately, nearly all of the educated assumptions that propped up their Ornithocheirus portrayal have since been disproven or have been greatly weakened in intervening years (aside from the previously mentioned fiasco involving the species' identity).
The episode avoids showing how it takes off, but it's now considered most likely pterosaurs used a pole-vaulting maneuver with their forelimbs to launch themselves off the ground without the need for a strong wind. The episode shows it skimming the water's surface for fish (similar to the Rhamphorhynchus), but it's now considered bio-mechanically impossible for any known pterosaur species to feed that way. The episode shows pterosaurs awkwardly waddling on the ground, but it's now thought most species would have been competent walkers or even runners. The series depicts pterosaurs with delicate, skin-thin wing membranes, but we now know they were much thicker, tougher, and more complex. The series depicts young pterosaurs being smaller carbon-copies of the adults, but it's now known flaplings were quite different in both appearance and ecology than adults. The episode depicts both its featured pterosaurs with strong sexual dimorphism; while this is known in Pteranodon, it is not conclusively known in any other pterosaur genera (as stated above, Tropeognathus was considered the male form of Ornithocheirus for the series). It's depicted as birds outcompeting pterosaurs due to being anatomically superior, but there's no real evidence for their ecological displacement; what actually seems to have happened is that juveniles of large pterosaurs filled the niches once filled by small pterosaurs.
There's also the issue of Ornithocheirus having an extremely convoluted taxonomic history, and (this should be familiar by this point) was a massive wastebasket taxon for much of its history, and nearly all the fossils referred to its were scattered fragments. At various points, nearly fifty species from four different continents (which is probably the basis for the species' cross-continental migration in the episode) were once assigned to it. It's even worse because the holotype was a rostrum tip with a single tooth (that probably didn't actually belong to it), and is also now lost. Meaning there is virtually nothing tangible referable to it at this point.
But anyway, I digress because this has gone on long enough. I chose Uktenadactylus (the specific species was once considered to belong to Coloborhynchus, itself a bit of a wastebasket taxon) to replace Ornithocheirus/Tropeognathus because it was a similar animal from the Barremian-aged Wessex Formation, the approximate time and location of the episode. The journey is going to remain in Europe rather than being cross-continental, partly because, as previously stated, the evidence for this example specifically has been disproven, and Tropeognathus didn't actually live at the right time (it's actually from the early Albian, more than ten million years later). It's not an optimal choice because it's another rostrum tip taxa, but a huge number of pterosaur taxa are ONLY known from rostrum tips; there's no choice that isn't equally as shoddy. With a wingspan of nearly six metres across, it wasn't nearly as large as Tropeognathus, but it's still quite a substantial animal, far, far larger than any flying animal that exists today and (despite what the episode says) would've been a very large pterosaur for its time.
