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IINSTEAD OF comparing them to birds' flight characteristics, try looking at the wing performance of butterflies since the outline is the same . also without a tail , it would be possible to droop the foot to act as a flight rudder instead of lifting them like geese
@@nottsork But, Butterflies are Arthropods, exokeleton rules apply. Also, they have to molt from Caterpillars, so who knows what natural selective forces are acting there. Whatever natrural selection is acting on Butterflies, it will be very different from any vertebrate flier.
Well there's not a lot to say about the toys of mostly accurate appearance, and it being a recent discovery it doesn't have hilariously bad toys, but yeah these deep dives are awesome
The focus of this episode was off the toys; Steven used them more as visual aids. But I loved it. So fascinating. And I really appreciate his final comment that humans’ understanding of ancient flapping animals would benefit from a little more humility.
I can tell you were really proud of that animation of the Quetzalcoatlus eating red balls (and you should be, because it's very neat) since you used it like 6 times lol
In my case at least, this seems to be caused by the limits of my capacity for terror 😅 ...Then on the the other hand there are apparently adult human people that will walk up to a bison or a moose to pet it, or even to intentionally annoy it. I guess maybe it's that we aren't accounting for the fact that how dangerous an animal actually is, has very little bearing on how frighting it will be to a given individual, in either direction?
@@jeffreygao3956yes but the Q.N. would be the real threat: calm, thin and then that beak would beat tf up outta people that would come up to it and pet it 🤣
The scene you were thinking of from Prehistoric Planet was rival female Quetzalcoatlus raiding another's nest and eating her eggs. Not cannibalism of the juveniles. The actual mother of the nest however DID abandon the hatchlings and didn't take care of them after they hatched. The documentary theorized that the nest was made on an island in a swamp where large predators like theropods were absent and small prey was plentiful while the flaplings (still love that word) developed.
Fan for years. Here to say excellent pronunciation of Azhdaha and yes, it's a dragon. Source, Farsi speaker who grew up with Azhdaha as meaning nothing other than dragon. Which is an extremely apt name.
For an animal that appears so often in media it’s history is surprisingly complex and it’s definitely one of those animals that looks straightforward until you look under the hood and it’s anything but
The thing is that they are all complex. Pterosaurs have nothing like them nowadays so they appear to be complex more easily, and they are also more enigmatic to specialists. But there's a lot of hidden layers of complexity to understanding any extinct animal, even when the skeleton appears familiar, and sometimes it's not easy to see. Like imagine if we found naked rat moles in the future, the social species. At first they'd just look like generic rodents. Then we'd find their different shapes, we'd find them groupped in ways that other rodents aren't found.
@@Ezullof youre right-understanding extinct animals is complex, even when their skeletal remains seem somewhat familiar. but are there any methods currently used to understand the hidden complexities of extinct ones especially when dealing with incomplete or fragmented fossil records? als
The coincidence of differently-sized Azhdarchids within the same ecologies reminds me a lot of herons. Blue, green and night herons are morphologically quite similar and often share space with one another, but vary in their size and behavior.
I love that every episode Steve gets more and more confident in his position as host, cracking wise and giving the camera occasional bombastic side-eye. It's glorious.
Why, yes, an hour-and-a-half-long deep dive on the current state of Quetzalcoatlus paleontology is *_precisely_* how I would like to spend a good portion of my Saturday evening, thank you for asking! *__*
Flightless apes who invented flying machines only 18 years before my grandfather was born: This animal that has had wings for 100 million years clearly couldn't fly good.
That's... A good point. I've gotten into debates with people over this and given that I'm not particularly scientifically literate it's hard for me to give a real conversation ending reason to believe they could fly. But now that you mention it, the length of time azhdarchids went with fully developed wings should be enough to dispel the idea they were flightless. Azhdarchids were around for a long time and none of them got less developed wings in any way.
@@catpoke9557There's an interesting computer analysis on takeoff and flight for LARGE pterosaurs like Azdharchids, indicating that they jumped into the air with all four limbs, then immediately spread the wings and flapped😮!
I can't thank you guys enough for the content you make. It's incredibly useful to amateur paleoartists like myself who need a visual aide to learn. My biggest shoutout to those who made the animations.
Azhdarchids have had lots of (well deserved) limelight in the paleo community within the past few years. Glad to see this episode and excited to take a deep dive into these incredibly alien pterosaurs!
One of my favourite things about this channel is that because the YDAW team has to put in so much research, thought and time into looking into every animal, every episode feels like a very long and editorialized review article on the state of the research about the current animal. And in a way that's far easier to understand and probably reaches way more people. Both with Giganotosaurus and now with Quetzalcoatlus there has been a lot of discussion about how certain aspects of research can be anachronistic or even just sort of odd. Giganotosaurus' skull reconstruction and Quetzalcoatlus semi-bipedal walking idea are good examples. I love it and will never stop watching.
I'd recommend the channel Ben G Thomas for you if you don't follow them already. It is made by a group of (not for long) students of paleontology and they interview and feature several paleontologists in person.
I went to Chicago for the first time last week, and I made sure to visit the Field Museum to get myself one of those blue boys from the mold-a-rama machine.
Whenever someone describes the quad launch model of pterosaur takeoff, all I can think is "Ah, yes, getting off the ground using the power of clap push-ups."
Everything a superb lecture should be - Well-documented, illustrative, comprhensively erudition, well-paced, never flagging in interest. To find it on UA-cam when you consider the ubiquitous junk clips that infest it was a shock.
The problem with hindlimb launch is that keeping weight under control is critical for anything that flies, and being able to hop into the air with your hindlimbs implies a whole bunch of muscle mass that basically only gets used for launch and then sits idle (and may not necessarily be all that useful on the ground, either). Birds are stuck with this arrangement as their forelimb anatomy doesn't allow forelimb launch, but for pterosaurs, that's not a problem.
you repeatedly showed that feeding envelope animation and honestly? I could have watched it even more lol. that one must have taken a lot of work! absolutely adorable, yeahhhh buddy nom those red orbs
I am commenting entirely to boost this video's metrics, because the more we interact, the more you guys can sustain the slow release schedule necessary to produce videos of this quality, and I definitely hope you can keep doing that for as long as you want to.
I am GLAD to see Padian's attempts to resurrect the no-leg brachiopatagium that he spent the entire 2021 monograph shouting over the other researchers who openly disagreed with him about it have been promptly ignored, and never shall a quail leg be used as an anatomical comparison for a pterosaur again.
I am so happy you are (still) doing this - even with longer and longer videos. The dinosaur loving kid in me that has never died got shimmering eyes. Thanks a lot!
Hey! I know that Mold-A-Rama! The other molds at the Field Museum are the wonderfully wacky vintage interpretations, which makes this modern one stand out even more gloriously than a giraffe stork would all on its own. ♥️
1:11:15 - This is hilarious to me, because my first ever introduction to Quetzalcoatlus was in the show "Dinosaur Train" where the Quetzal character flies to get to the train and return a doll to one of the main characters before the train enters a tunnel and it becomes too late. So, little 7-8 year old me thought that was the coolest giant flying lizard ever and ever since I've seen Quetzalcoatlus as one of my favourite Mesozoic creatures ever.
50:53 I'll note that quadrupedal mammals have this same sort of thing going on with running. Their fastest gaits tend to stretch the limbs out fully, then draw them all in under the belly, which ends up using locomotive effort to help pump the lungs.
WOW. i dont think ive seen a video from this channel before. but this is some of the most visually appealing and informatively detailed animations and graphics ive ever seen for this type of discussion. and your oration skills are great, . love the fact that you dont 'dumb it down' but its also not so technical that it requires a phd. this is amazing, clicked by chance and loved every minute
I went to the Houston Museum recently and I saw their Quetz skeleton. The concept of something so large being able to swoop down and scoop you up is simultaneously awe inspiring and terrifying
Flapping wing and other time-variable flight is such a challenge to even study, combining it with biomechanics and then _interpretation of extinct creature anatomy from partial specimens_ is impressive to even be able to attempt, and I'm kind of not surprised it doesn't have all that many truly solid conclusions. My college advisor's main field of research focus in aerospace engineering ten years ago was flapping wing stuff, and sitting in on the research group meetings mostly hammered home to me how much that field was in its infancy then for designing and optimizing flapping wing performance or modeling flapping performance of existing animals. Even just defining all the different ways a rigid flapping wing could move and articulate was incredibly complex terminology, much less the way it could deform with a membrane type wing!
1:20:05 There were actually a couple of species of flightless bats that evolved in New Zealand, along with the many flightless birds. They went extinct very early during the modern invasion of New Zealand by human-introduced species. If anything, this actually seems to emphasize Steve's point that not every flying taxon is equally likely to evolve flightlessness given the right circumstances. Quetzalcoatlus is one of my favourites. Thank you, Steve & Liz!
AHH! Finally, a pterosaur!!!!!!!! I can finally learn how to be irrationally angry whenever media gets them wrong!! Jokes aside I love quetzal and have always wanted to learn more about the pterosaurs in general. Will we get pterosaur stickers and mugs on the etsy shop (or at least quetzalcoatlus but y'know a certain winged basin from hatzeg would also be neat *wink wink*)
We have a few pterosaur related items already, and more Quetzalcoatlus ones will be joining soon. We do have some Derpy Quetzalcoatlus pins that we cut ourselves there at the moment, though. And a few things related to our Pteranodon videos. :)
On the subject of insulation and managing body temperature, whatever their external thermal environment looked like, shedding muscle heat from high-effort phases of flight would likely have been an issue, especially if they were true endotherms starting from an elevated body temperature and needing to maintain their body temperature within a narrow range. This strengthens the argument for giant azhdarchids being soarers (spending most of their time in flight with updrafts doing the work for them), which in turn strengthens the argument for the longer-wingspan estimates for size (as soaring performance and general flight efficiency depend aerodynamically on a high aspect ratio).
I agree and suspect that the Giant Azhdarchids like Q. Northropi had proportionally longer wings than the smaller ones like Q. Lawsoni. Even if you go to 29:29, the text says that the first wing finger bone of Q. Northropi is proportionally longer than that of Q. Lawsoni, implying a proportionally longer, higher aspect ratio wing.
I think it is worth it to keep in mind that when flying, heat is being transferred from the body to the air flowing over the body. Kinda like an air cooled engine, such as in many of those smal airplanes. Also, I don't know the exact structure of the Pterosaur wing, but perhaps it could function like a gigantic radiator.🤷♂️
I hope this episode starts off a trend of portraying Quetzalcoatlus parental care. Imagine the little flaplings following their parent around like cassowaries.
If I'm not mistaken, the image of Quetzalcoatlus with a tiny, back-swept crest and this long (presumably keratinous) ridge running down from its crest up to the tip of its beak, thus building up the latter and making it taller and boxier in profile view, originated with John Sibbick's artwork for the 1991 book The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs by Peter Wellnhofer. Not sure why Sibbick illustrated it that way, maybe because he and Wellnhofer didn't have direct access to the Q. lawsoni material and it was only properly described in 1996, but I think that's where that particular and quite odd-looking image of Quetzalcoatlus came from and was frequently copied (a paleo meme) in the 90s.
I wouldn't trust Kevin Padian too much when it comes to pterosaur locomotion on the ground. During the 80s and 90s, he was the leading proponent for the idea that pterosaurs simply had to have walked bipedally like birds, even when many of his colleagues were already leaning towards or embracing the theory that these animals were quadrupeds. That, and the simple fact that he's an old guard paleontologist, makes me think that he is still fixed on the idea that "pterosaurs are just big birds", and the opinions of younger pterosaur researchers like Mark Witton are more valid and objective.
05:33 is exactly right as a pterosaur enthusiast. And LOL at the "Hatz would win" bit. I'm European and I'd like that but I personally like Quetz a bit more since we actually know what its skull looked like.
The sheer glee of noticing that a new YDAW video dropped just as I'm settling in for bed and looking for a cozy science vid to lull me into a deep slumber
Comment for the algorithm. I’ve seen this a million times because it is very soothing to me. My favorite joke continues to be “flappy meals” because it’s so cute and I love so much that baby pterosaurs are called flapplings
I always love the 2d 'craft paper like' recreations you use while explaining these concepts. The amount of work that must go into them is awesome, even if it means we get the annual HBO schedule for videos.
Can you please do Parasaurolophus? It’s a really interesting genus that, while not as much as stuff like iguanodon and spinosaurus, has gone through a lot of changes. I’ve also seen different type of depictions, from ones with membranes that almost give the appearance of a webbed crest, to being super chonky, to arguments over its posture. I think it’d make a great vid! I’d also request spinosaurus, but I’d imagine you’d understandably not wanna touch that.
I like to imagine that if azdharchids were altricial, or at least the truly massive ones where, then the flapplings would hop up onto their parents and hold onto their feathers or even maybe sit in their bills in flight. Like how baby crocodilians will be moved around in their mothers snouts.
Absolutely amazing idea! I, too, have imagined scenarios where if a large Azhdarchid needed to transport its eggs or offspring, it would scoop them up in its beak and hold them in a throat pouch (a feature that even modern crocodilians have for the same purpose). Then it could walk or even fly the necessary distance to relocate its young. Ironically, if people witnessed this behavior, we'd probably have a myth of Azhdarchids regularly eating their own young 😂.
That flying Quetzalcoatlus model appeared in the BBC series "Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives" in 1989, hosted by Attenborough, I watched it at the time and have it on DVD, well worth a watch.
My favorite episode ever, hands down. I LOVE azhdarchids but their anatomy is SO whack compared to almost all other tetrapods, I’ve been trying to draw them more since they’re one of my favorite groups on animals and still struggle to get them right 😭 This is literally one big auditory art reference and brain candy for me thank you
I see a wee blue fellow among the toys you got in the Field's Museum! :3 EDIT: Also I looked up Azhdaha and got a Genshin Impact character. Adding Persian Mythology does get a dragon that you were thinking of! XD
Awesome episode, might be my favourite yet. What's great about pterosaurs and pterousaur research is that they constantly challenge how we view animals by just how weird they are. They basically force anybody who studies them to think outside the box.
This video is giving me the itch to load up Path of Titans and terrorize things as Quetzalcoatlus. The Primordial Titans modding team has a beautifully modeled and realistic Quetz
I'm very impressed with the quality of the content and the production of your videos. While there was nothing really wrong with your old videos, the lighting, sound and consistency is excellent now. You have impressively matched colorimetry and exposure from your multi camera setup. Your lighting is spot on. Does this matter, given the quality of the content? No but it still adds. Good work!
Still waiting on that revision of the accuracy tierlist to make Walking with Beasts C level, Walking with Dinosaurs D level, March of the Dinosaurs D level, The Truth about Killer Dinosaurs B+, and Prehistoric Predators higher.
The forward shifted wings makes a lot of sense to my intuition, it visually just looks a lot more balanced with that huge head. I would LOVE a glow in the dark ceiling sticker of the silhouette for the bedroom!
24:15 Speaking of that, I'm still surprised that we found no evidence of a giant, Deinosuchus-like alligatoroid in the Maastrichtian of North America, even though we find Deinosuchus at Big Bend, the same place as Quetzalcoatlus and Alamosaurus, only in lower strata around 5 million years older or more, and everywhere else across Laramidia and Appalachia throughout the Campanian. And I never realized "Aguja" was pronounced, "Aguha". I knew "Javelina" is pronounced with an H, because that name is an alternative name for peccaries.
I was kind of surprised, (and kind of not), at how many times I laughed out loud while watching this episode. "But I'm going to nitpick [the paper] because it's my show and I get to be perantic." 😂 So much great information compiled into an hour and a half episode! Thanks for all the work you do, and for making it accessible to everyone.
8:38 even Final Fantasy agrees with you! There's eight 'great wyrms' in Fantasy 14, a few of which have also shown up in other games in the series. All of them are named after legendary creatures, *usually* dragons. One of them is named Azdaja after the azhdaha of Iranian myth. what i *didn't* know but probably should have guessed is that my favorite pterosaurs are named after them too!
36:05 We do have a partial ulna (WAM60.57) from the Maastrichtian of Australia which has been attributed to a midsized azhdarchid around the size of Q. lawsoni, first described in 1990.
26:27 We do have fossil material of the usual stem-birds in Late Cretaceous Laramidia in the adjacent Ojo Alamo Formation of New Mexico, which also has fossils of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis and Tyrannosaurus sp. and dates to the Maastrichtian. Those would be the wolf-sized raptor Dineobellator, the caenagnathid Ojoraptorsaurus, and indeterminate troodontids and ornithomimids, all of them very fragmentary (Ojoraptorsaurus just being an an incomplete pair of fused pubes) but I would expect those same taxa to be present at Javelina.
Azhdarchids manage to be the only animals (that we know of) that manage to dominate the land without compromising their ability to fly. If the K-Pg extinction never happened, they would still be dominating food chains worldwide
The argument that I would make for Azhdarchids moving their wing attachment point at the leg from the ankle to the knee is that by doing so they move their center of lift forward which would help counterbalance that huge, (relatively) heavy head at the end of the massive lever that is their neck.
Great job on the video. It took me 5 days to get through because I kept falling asleep while watching it after work. I promise this is not meant as an insult. Your delivery of Dino info is just relaxing.
Its a good day when a new YDAW drops! The timming is great too, im wating the mail to come with my new "talk dumb, get the thumb" mug! So excited to support you guys!
Hey Steven. I saw you discussion about Pterosaur movement on the ground. When reading Witton's 2013 book one researcher stuck out to me: Kevin Padian. I don't know if that's because of how Mark Witton wrote the book/review, but the picture emerged that Padian is a Pterosaur guru through and through, but that he's also not really the most open minded and clinging on to older ideas. It's probably something to keep in mind with papers from Padian, as you did in the segment on walking.👍 Anyways I really enjoyed the video and will take look at the sources that I hadn't seen before!
If you like our stuff, and would like to help us keep making it, please consider chipping in over at patreon.com/YDAW, or taking a look at our shops (yourdinosaursarewrong.com or www.etsy.com/shop/YDAWtheShop ), or by buying Steven a coffee at ko-fi.com/ydawtheshow . All proceeds go back into making the videos you see here!
wow 1:30 hours!? dude you've outdone yourself. this is excellent. please make more long form videos like this
IINSTEAD OF comparing them to birds' flight characteristics, try looking at the wing performance of butterflies since the outline is the same . also without a tail , it would be possible to droop the foot to act as a flight rudder instead of lifting them like geese
46:24 I can see in UV lol. Thanks for the inclusion. Yay not having UV filtering eye lenses.
@@nottsork But, Butterflies are Arthropods, exokeleton rules apply. Also, they have to molt from Caterpillars, so who knows what natural selective forces are acting there. Whatever natrural selection is acting on Butterflies, it will be very different from any vertebrate flier.
Do you guys have a book?
Old YDAW: whats wrong with this toy?
Modern YDAW: Let me tell you the entire history of this species and its biology (thats a good thing)
Well there's not a lot to say about the toys of mostly accurate appearance, and it being a recent discovery it doesn't have hilariously bad toys, but yeah these deep dives are awesome
Yeah, I feel like the educational angle of the show greatly improved as the series progressed
speaking of all this the description of the channel should probably be updated
The focus of this episode was off the toys; Steven used them more as visual aids. But I loved it. So fascinating. And I really appreciate his final comment that humans’ understanding of ancient flapping animals would benefit from a little more humility.
I personally love the ecological description of what the full environment it lived in was.
"I'm glad I imagined you asked that." - My new favorite sentence of all time.
Gives "I'm going to pretend I didn't pretend to hear that" from ATLA
We need a shirt with it on it.
I'll use that before oversharing my newest obsession from now on 😂
The funny thing is, that was my first reaction to unspoken question.
Very quotable too!
I'm sorry, your quetzalcoatlus has a bad case of giganotosaurus, its morphological.
*laugh track*
*Seinfeld theme*
😂😊
I don't get it.
Lmao I pictured a quetz with rickets
I can tell you were really proud of that animation of the Quetzalcoatlus eating red balls (and you should be, because it's very neat) since you used it like 6 times lol
Heck yeah.
quetzalcoatlus swallowing red balls 🌚
I wanna see that same animation to demonstrate the difference in reach for the known large pterosaurs.
Yeah!! The animations in these ideos are so nice lol, it reminds me of the dilophosaurus range one
It really must've been something to behold to see an animal as tall as a giraffe launch itself 20+ feet into the air.
I don't think people realize how terrifying a giraffe sized stork would be
In my case at least, this seems to be caused by the limits of my capacity for terror 😅
...Then on the the other hand there are apparently adult human people that will walk up to a bison or a moose to pet it, or even to intentionally annoy it. I guess maybe it's that we aren't accounting for the fact that how dangerous an animal actually is, has very little bearing on how frighting it will be to a given individual, in either direction?
Pfft. Hatzegopteryx is true terror.
@@jeffreygao3956yes but the Q.N. would be the real threat: calm, thin and then that beak would beat tf up outta people that would come up to it and pet it 🤣
You wouldn't leave children unattended around them, that's for sure. If they existed at the same time as us we would've made them extinct.
After seeing illustrations of them eating baby dinosaurs whole, like sucking down a tic-tac I have to agree.
TLDR on pterosaur flight: stop assuming they fly like birds, they aren't dang birds!
"Flaplings"??? Ok that's an awesome name for the babies!
I bet the bendy neck comes from how IRL herons fly, with their necks bent in a dramatic S
It's very bird.
So what I learned is that scientists keep looking at Pterosaurs and trying to apply bird physics to them despite their differences
The scene you were thinking of from Prehistoric Planet was rival female Quetzalcoatlus raiding another's nest and eating her eggs. Not cannibalism of the juveniles. The actual mother of the nest however DID abandon the hatchlings and didn't take care of them after they hatched. The documentary theorized that the nest was made on an island in a swamp where large predators like theropods were absent and small prey was plentiful while the flaplings (still love that word) developed.
I always think about how early dinosaur reconstructions look like no one considered asking the opinions of even a single butcher.....
Fan for years. Here to say excellent pronunciation of Azhdaha and yes, it's a dragon. Source, Farsi speaker who grew up with Azhdaha as meaning nothing other than dragon. Which is an extremely apt name.
Babe wake up, YDAW just dropped an hour and a half long video on quetzalcoatlus!
And now my day is perfect ❤
I had to wait until I could get a time slot properly enjoy it.
I literally did send this message to my girlfriend 😂
For an animal that appears so often in media it’s history is surprisingly complex and it’s definitely one of those animals that looks straightforward until you look under the hood and it’s anything but
The thing is that they are all complex. Pterosaurs have nothing like them nowadays so they appear to be complex more easily, and they are also more enigmatic to specialists.
But there's a lot of hidden layers of complexity to understanding any extinct animal, even when the skeleton appears familiar, and sometimes it's not easy to see.
Like imagine if we found naked rat moles in the future, the social species. At first they'd just look like generic rodents. Then we'd find their different shapes, we'd find them groupped in ways that other rodents aren't found.
@@Ezullof youre right-understanding extinct animals is complex, even when their skeletal remains seem somewhat familiar. but are there any methods currently used to understand the hidden complexities of extinct ones especially when dealing with incomplete or fragmented fossil records? als
Gosh yall are going to get me back in to drawing azhdarchids
Do iiiiiiiiiiiit!
I can't stop laughing growth reconstruction at 33:17 with the neck and head getting huge and then flopping over. 🤣
And the arm still standing😂
The coincidence of differently-sized Azhdarchids within the same ecologies reminds me a lot of herons. Blue, green and night herons are morphologically quite similar and often share space with one another, but vary in their size and behavior.
I love that every episode Steve gets more and more confident in his position as host, cracking wise and giving the camera occasional bombastic side-eye. It's glorious.
My brother from another mother!
I confirm. I am Iranian and the word for dragon in our language is Azhdaha(اژدها)
Why, yes, an hour-and-a-half-long deep dive on the current state of Quetzalcoatlus paleontology is *_precisely_* how I would like to spend a good portion of my Saturday evening, thank you for asking! *__*
Flightless apes who invented flying machines only 18 years before my grandfather was born: This animal that has had wings for 100 million years clearly couldn't fly good.
That's... A good point. I've gotten into debates with people over this and given that I'm not particularly scientifically literate it's hard for me to give a real conversation ending reason to believe they could fly. But now that you mention it, the length of time azhdarchids went with fully developed wings should be enough to dispel the idea they were flightless. Azhdarchids were around for a long time and none of them got less developed wings in any way.
@@catpoke9557There's an interesting computer analysis on takeoff and flight for LARGE pterosaurs like Azdharchids, indicating that they jumped into the air with all four limbs, then immediately spread the wings and flapped😮!
@@royjacksonjr.4447 vampire bat style.
All this comparison to birds flight tactics, and not one study trying to draw parallels between bats and pterosaurs?!
Yes, but azhdarchids didn’t go to the moon
I can't thank you guys enough for the content you make. It's incredibly useful to amateur paleoartists like myself who need a visual aide to learn. My biggest shoutout to those who made the animations.
Thank you so much! Steven is the one who does the animating. :)
Love this animal- the coatless pretzel or whatever
😂😂
As a German, I can confirm that he is talking indeed about pretzels. I should know.
💪🧐 🥨
They are delicious, though.
@@melenatorr i mean i'd try pterosaur meat
My favorite part of modern Azhdarchid artistic renditions is the fuzzy lil tail. It’s so cute.
Quetzalcoatlus: “HOOONNNNNK!”
*insert terrifying honks here*
🤣🤣🤣 yes
gotta love it when extinct animals make HOOOONK noises
*insert goose noises or trumpet meme here* (the honking noises they make in some media are lowkey great lol)
Azhdarchids have had lots of (well deserved) limelight in the paleo community within the past few years. Glad to see this episode and excited to take a deep dive into these incredibly alien pterosaurs!
One of my favourite things about this channel is that because the YDAW team has to put in so much research, thought and time into looking into every animal, every episode feels like a very long and editorialized review article on the state of the research about the current animal. And in a way that's far easier to understand and probably reaches way more people. Both with Giganotosaurus and now with Quetzalcoatlus there has been a lot of discussion about how certain aspects of research can be anachronistic or even just sort of odd. Giganotosaurus' skull reconstruction and Quetzalcoatlus semi-bipedal walking idea are good examples. I love it and will never stop watching.
I'd recommend the channel Ben G Thomas for you if you don't follow them already. It is made by a group of (not for long) students of paleontology and they interview and feature several paleontologists in person.
I went to Chicago for the first time last week, and I made sure to visit the Field Museum to get myself one of those blue boys from the mold-a-rama machine.
Whenever someone describes the quad launch model of pterosaur takeoff, all I can think is "Ah, yes, getting off the ground using the power of clap push-ups."
Good one.
Everything a superb lecture should be - Well-documented, illustrative, comprhensively erudition, well-paced, never flagging in interest. To find it on UA-cam when you consider the ubiquitous junk clips that infest it was a shock.
The problem with hindlimb launch is that keeping weight under control is critical for anything that flies, and being able to hop into the air with your hindlimbs implies a whole bunch of muscle mass that basically only gets used for launch and then sits idle (and may not necessarily be all that useful on the ground, either). Birds are stuck with this arrangement as their forelimb anatomy doesn't allow forelimb launch, but for pterosaurs, that's not a problem.
Yes, unlike birds, pterosaurus used the same muscles for walking, launching, and flying. Way more efficient body plan.
I love how these videos have evolved beyond toy critiques into mini-documentaries about specific species.
Keep up the excellent work!
you repeatedly showed that feeding envelope animation and honestly? I could have watched it even more lol. that one must have taken a lot of work! absolutely adorable, yeahhhh buddy nom those red orbs
Felt like an 8-bit computer game.
That ad at the beginning! 😂 You are such a dork AND I LOVE IT! 🤣
Glad you liked it!!
I am commenting entirely to boost this video's metrics, because the more we interact, the more you guys can sustain the slow release schedule necessary to produce videos of this quality, and I definitely hope you can keep doing that for as long as you want to.
Thanks for that!
I am GLAD to see Padian's attempts to resurrect the no-leg brachiopatagium that he spent the entire 2021 monograph shouting over the other researchers who openly disagreed with him about it have been promptly ignored, and never shall a quail leg be used as an anatomical comparison for a pterosaur again.
I am so happy you are (still) doing this - even with longer and longer videos. The dinosaur loving kid in me that has never died got shimmering eyes. Thanks a lot!
Thanks a LOT for still producing this show after all those years.
Wow! Thank YOU!
@@YourDinosaursAreWrong You're welcome! 🙂❤
Using bird aerodynamics on pterosaurs. Like proving bears couldnt walk with all that body mass but all ur data comes from big cats…
0:35 this is making me realise how strange it is to hear YDAW as "Y-D-A-W" instead of "Y-Daw", which is how it sounds in my head.
Personally it's always been Y-D-A-W in my head. I'm also yelling it in my head bc it's capitalized 😂.
I agree, "why-daw"
I always read it as G-Daw
@@bothewolf3466 Why tho?
(jk, it sounds like this in my head to lol)
Same
1:23:06 I love the animation showing them circling around. I love all the animations really but I like this one especially.
Agreed! I also love the picking up of food items in a very grid game like manner.
Hey! I know that Mold-A-Rama! The other molds at the Field Museum are the wonderfully wacky vintage interpretations, which makes this modern one stand out even more gloriously than a giraffe stork would all on its own. ♥️
I had the exact same thought when I saw it 😂
1:11:15 - This is hilarious to me, because my first ever introduction to Quetzalcoatlus was in the show "Dinosaur Train" where the Quetzal character flies to get to the train and return a doll to one of the main characters before the train enters a tunnel and it becomes too late. So, little 7-8 year old me thought that was the coolest giant flying lizard ever and ever since I've seen Quetzalcoatlus as one of my favourite Mesozoic creatures ever.
50:53 I'll note that quadrupedal mammals have this same sort of thing going on with running. Their fastest gaits tend to stretch the limbs out fully, then draw them all in under the belly, which ends up using locomotive effort to help pump the lungs.
*”Especially since Hatzegopteryx would win”* 😂😂😂😂
WOW. i dont think ive seen a video from this channel before. but this is some of the most visually appealing and informatively detailed animations and graphics ive ever seen for this type of discussion. and your oration skills are great, . love the fact that you dont 'dumb it down' but its also not so technical that it requires a phd.
this is amazing, clicked by chance and loved every minute
Wow, thank you so much! We’re very flattered. :)
And now you lucky person get to enjoy the whole back catalogue!
Giraffe Storks, the best description of a Quetzalcoatlus!
32:25 flaplings?! That’s adorable!
I went to the Houston Museum recently and I saw their Quetz skeleton. The concept of something so large being able to swoop down and scoop you up is simultaneously awe inspiring and terrifying
Extra long neck quetza flopping over was adorable
Flapping wing and other time-variable flight is such a challenge to even study, combining it with biomechanics and then _interpretation of extinct creature anatomy from partial specimens_ is impressive to even be able to attempt, and I'm kind of not surprised it doesn't have all that many truly solid conclusions. My college advisor's main field of research focus in aerospace engineering ten years ago was flapping wing stuff, and sitting in on the research group meetings mostly hammered home to me how much that field was in its infancy then for designing and optimizing flapping wing performance or modeling flapping performance of existing animals. Even just defining all the different ways a rigid flapping wing could move and articulate was incredibly complex terminology, much less the way it could deform with a membrane type wing!
1:20:05 There were actually a couple of species of flightless bats that evolved in New Zealand, along with the many flightless birds. They went extinct very early during the modern invasion of New Zealand by human-introduced species. If anything, this actually seems to emphasize Steve's point that not every flying taxon is equally likely to evolve flightlessness given the right circumstances.
Quetzalcoatlus is one of my favourites. Thank you, Steve & Liz!
Kakapo still still has large wingss despite being flightless so yea you have a point
AHH! Finally, a pterosaur!!!!!!!! I can finally learn how to be irrationally angry whenever media gets them wrong!! Jokes aside I love quetzal and have always wanted to learn more about the pterosaurs in general.
Will we get pterosaur stickers and mugs on the etsy shop (or at least quetzalcoatlus but y'know a certain winged basin from hatzeg would also be neat *wink wink*)
We have a few pterosaur related items already, and more Quetzalcoatlus ones will be joining soon. We do have some Derpy Quetzalcoatlus pins that we cut ourselves there at the moment, though. And a few things related to our Pteranodon videos. :)
A pelican the size of a giraffe that could land and gallope after you. Terrifying
Especially given how vile modern, very modestly sized pelicans are 😳
On the subject of insulation and managing body temperature, whatever their external thermal environment looked like, shedding muscle heat from high-effort phases of flight would likely have been an issue, especially if they were true endotherms starting from an elevated body temperature and needing to maintain their body temperature within a narrow range.
This strengthens the argument for giant azhdarchids being soarers (spending most of their time in flight with updrafts doing the work for them), which in turn strengthens the argument for the longer-wingspan estimates for size (as soaring performance and general flight efficiency depend aerodynamically on a high aspect ratio).
I agree and suspect that the Giant Azhdarchids like Q. Northropi had proportionally longer wings than the smaller ones like Q. Lawsoni.
Even if you go to 29:29, the text says that the first wing finger bone of Q. Northropi is proportionally longer than that of Q. Lawsoni, implying a proportionally longer, higher aspect ratio wing.
I think it is worth it to keep in mind that when flying, heat is being transferred from the body to the air flowing over the body. Kinda like an air cooled engine, such as in many of those smal airplanes.
Also, I don't know the exact structure of the Pterosaur wing, but perhaps it could function like a gigantic radiator.🤷♂️
I hope this episode starts off a trend of portraying Quetzalcoatlus parental care. Imagine the little flaplings following their parent around like cassowaries.
Can I just say that the graphics y’all make never cease to amaze me
If I'm not mistaken, the image of Quetzalcoatlus with a tiny, back-swept crest and this long (presumably keratinous) ridge running down from its crest up to the tip of its beak, thus building up the latter and making it taller and boxier in profile view, originated with John Sibbick's artwork for the 1991 book The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs by Peter Wellnhofer.
Not sure why Sibbick illustrated it that way, maybe because he and Wellnhofer didn't have direct access to the Q. lawsoni material and it was only properly described in 1996, but I think that's where that particular and quite odd-looking image of Quetzalcoatlus came from and was frequently copied (a paleo meme) in the 90s.
I recognize one of those toys, it's from the Field Museum (the light blue plastic mold). I have one.
It is!
I wouldn't trust Kevin Padian too much when it comes to pterosaur locomotion on the ground. During the 80s and 90s, he was the leading proponent for the idea that pterosaurs simply had to have walked bipedally like birds, even when many of his colleagues were already leaning towards or embracing the theory that these animals were quadrupeds. That, and the simple fact that he's an old guard paleontologist, makes me think that he is still fixed on the idea that "pterosaurs are just big birds", and the opinions of younger pterosaur researchers like Mark Witton are more valid and objective.
05:33 is exactly right as a pterosaur enthusiast. And LOL at the "Hatz would win" bit. I'm European and I'd like that but I personally like Quetz a bit more since we actually know what its skull looked like.
The sheer glee of noticing that a new YDAW video dropped just as I'm settling in for bed and looking for a cozy science vid to lull me into a deep slumber
Comment for the algorithm. I’ve seen this a million times because it is very soothing to me. My favorite joke continues to be “flappy meals” because it’s so cute and I love so much that baby pterosaurs are called flapplings
I always love the 2d 'craft paper like' recreations you use while explaining these concepts. The amount of work that must go into them is awesome, even if it means we get the annual HBO schedule for videos.
Thank you very much!
Can you please do Parasaurolophus? It’s a really interesting genus that, while not as much as stuff like iguanodon and spinosaurus, has gone through a lot of changes. I’ve also seen different type of depictions, from ones with membranes that almost give the appearance of a webbed crest, to being super chonky, to arguments over its posture. I think it’d make a great vid!
I’d also request spinosaurus, but I’d imagine you’d understandably not wanna touch that.
Azhdarchids are one of my all time favorite animal families! There’s something so beautiful yet terrifying about them…
I wouldn't describe Quetzalcoatlus as friendly
i strongly disagree
Maybe if you put yourself in their mouth instead of complaining and resisting, they would
@@tommystofko6004 That thing is a dragon!
@@tommystofko6004you are a snack that can be swallowed whole… its not friendly
xdont be racist, u never even met her w
I like to imagine that if azdharchids were altricial, or at least the truly massive ones where, then the flapplings would hop up onto their parents and hold onto their feathers or even maybe sit in their bills in flight. Like how baby crocodilians will be moved around in their mothers snouts.
Absolutely amazing idea!
I, too, have imagined scenarios where if a large Azhdarchid needed to transport its eggs or offspring, it would scoop them up in its beak and hold them in a throat pouch (a feature that even modern crocodilians have for the same purpose).
Then it could walk or even fly the necessary distance to relocate its young.
Ironically, if people witnessed this behavior, we'd probably have a myth of Azhdarchids regularly eating their own young 😂.
That flying Quetzalcoatlus model appeared in the BBC series "Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives" in 1989, hosted by Attenborough, I watched it at the time and have it on DVD, well worth a watch.
My favorite episode ever, hands down. I LOVE azhdarchids but their anatomy is SO whack compared to almost all other tetrapods, I’ve been trying to draw them more since they’re one of my favorite groups on animals and still struggle to get them right 😭 This is literally one big auditory art reference and brain candy for me thank you
I love how well the script gets in depth detail but keeps funny and friendly phrasing. Amazing work!
I see a wee blue fellow among the toys you got in the Field's Museum! :3
EDIT: Also I looked up Azhdaha and got a Genshin Impact character. Adding Persian Mythology does get a dragon that you were thinking of! XD
Awesome episode, might be my favourite yet. What's great about pterosaurs and pterousaur research is that they constantly challenge how we view animals by just how weird they are. They basically force anybody who studies them to think outside the box.
1:01:24 i love how sassy steven gets when pointing out inconsistencies in analyzation
This video is giving me the itch to load up Path of Titans and terrorize things as Quetzalcoatlus. The Primordial Titans modding team has a beautifully modeled and realistic Quetz
I'm very impressed with the quality of the content and the production of your videos.
While there was nothing really wrong with your old videos, the lighting, sound and consistency is excellent now.
You have impressively matched colorimetry and exposure from your multi camera setup. Your lighting is spot on.
Does this matter, given the quality of the content? No but it still adds.
Good work!
"This is where the fun begins"
Nice reference!
Still waiting on that revision of the accuracy tierlist to make Walking with Beasts C level, Walking with Dinosaurs D level, March of the Dinosaurs D level, The Truth about Killer Dinosaurs B+, and Prehistoric Predators higher.
The third Quetzalcoatlus toy on the table (on your left) is a classic.
I've seen it nearly everywhere online, and I have one myself!
The forward shifted wings makes a lot of sense to my intuition, it visually just looks a lot more balanced with that huge head. I would LOVE a glow in the dark ceiling sticker of the silhouette for the bedroom!
24:15 Speaking of that, I'm still surprised that we found no evidence of a giant, Deinosuchus-like alligatoroid in the Maastrichtian of North America, even though we find Deinosuchus at Big Bend, the same place as Quetzalcoatlus and Alamosaurus, only in lower strata around 5 million years older or more, and everywhere else across Laramidia and Appalachia throughout the Campanian.
And I never realized "Aguja" was pronounced, "Aguha". I knew "Javelina" is pronounced with an H, because that name is an alternative name for peccaries.
I was kind of surprised, (and kind of not), at how many times I laughed out loud while watching this episode.
"But I'm going to nitpick [the paper] because it's my show and I get to be perantic." 😂
So much great information compiled into an hour and a half episode! Thanks for all the work you do, and for making it accessible to everyone.
Im sorry, it took me way too long to realise while watching, but Pterosaur babys are called FLAPLINGS??? That's SO adorable
Excellent episode, I consider myself well versed in azhdarchids but you brought up actually a few points that I didn't know about yet.
My takeaway from this video is that quetzalcoatlus was the main predator of basketballs.
8:38 even Final Fantasy agrees with you! There's eight 'great wyrms' in Fantasy 14, a few of which have also shown up in other games in the series. All of them are named after legendary creatures, *usually* dragons. One of them is named Azdaja after the azhdaha of Iranian myth. what i *didn't* know but probably should have guessed is that my favorite pterosaurs are named after them too!
36:05 We do have a partial ulna (WAM60.57) from the Maastrichtian of Australia which has been attributed to a midsized azhdarchid around the size of Q. lawsoni, first described in 1990.
That particular feeling of joy when you get a new YDAW video. With extra sparkles because azhdarchids are cool as heck.
26:27 We do have fossil material of the usual stem-birds in Late Cretaceous Laramidia in the adjacent Ojo Alamo Formation of New Mexico, which also has fossils of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis and Tyrannosaurus sp. and dates to the Maastrichtian. Those would be the wolf-sized raptor Dineobellator, the caenagnathid Ojoraptorsaurus, and indeterminate troodontids and ornithomimids, all of them very fragmentary (Ojoraptorsaurus just being an an incomplete pair of fused pubes) but I would expect those same taxa to be present at Javelina.
Azhdarchids manage to be the only animals (that we know of) that manage to dominate the land without compromising their ability to fly. If the K-Pg extinction never happened, they would still be dominating food chains worldwide
Took me three days, but I watched the whole thing. awesome
What wonderful animals! Thank you for the video.
I don't finish the video yet, but this is amazing. I didn't know Quetzalcoatlus was this interesting.
Great video!
The argument that I would make for Azhdarchids moving their wing attachment point at the leg from the ankle to the knee is that by doing so they move their center of lift forward which would help counterbalance that huge, (relatively) heavy head at the end of the massive lever that is their neck.
Great job on the video. It took me 5 days to get through because I kept falling asleep while watching it after work.
I promise this is not meant as an insult. Your delivery of Dino info is just relaxing.
Its a good day when a new YDAW drops!
The timming is great too, im wating the mail to come with my new "talk dumb, get the thumb" mug! So excited to support you guys!
I love how many Azhdarkhids are just naned after various cultures dragon-analogues
Like Toothless, for example. :D
Hey Steven. I saw you discussion about Pterosaur movement on the ground. When reading Witton's 2013 book one researcher stuck out to me: Kevin Padian.
I don't know if that's because of how Mark Witton wrote the book/review, but the picture emerged that Padian is a Pterosaur guru through and through, but that he's also not really the most open minded and clinging on to older ideas. It's probably something to keep in mind with papers from Padian, as you did in the segment on walking.👍
Anyways I really enjoyed the video and will take look at the sources that I hadn't seen before!
OMG I love the Quetzalcoatlus drone! Look at it!