Pterosaurs, the winged reptiles that ruled the skies during the era of the dinosaurs, may not have been the pea-brains that scientists thought. High-tech analyses of pterosaur skulls show that the first flying vertebrates packed some sophisticated navigational hardware.
Larry Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens, and his colleagues examined two unusually intact pterosaur skulls, one from crow-size Rhamphorhynchus, the other from the eagle-size Anhanguera. The researchers took high-resolution CT scans of the skulls to map the imprint of braincases and then used a computer program to reconstruct the contours of the actual brains. The results reveal that pterosaurs had a giant flocculus, a brain region responsible for keeping track of the body’s location and for coordinating the movement of the eyes.
That oversize flocculus may have collected sensory information from nerve fibers along the creature’s wings, Witmer says. He speculates that the flocculus worked in concert with ...
