pterosaur take-off

Scientists have long been perplexed by the size of pterosaurs. The largest species of the extinct flying reptiles were roughly the size of modern giraffes and weighed far more than any bird, posing the question: how did they get all that bulk into the air? Birds generally leap into flight, relying on the strength of their legs, but the muscle mass that pterosaurs would need for a similar take-off would be far too great to allow them to fly at all. Some scientists have suggested that they used cliff edges or wind patterns to launch themselves, but these would have been unreliable factors, particularly in an age replete with formidable land-bound predators like tyrannosaurs; furthermore, pterosaur fossils have been found well away from any cliffs.

Michael Habib of Johns Hopkins may have the answer. Having done analyses of bone strength in both the forelimbs and hindlimbs of pterosaurs, he has concluded that they would have been capable of a four-legged takeoff, folding up their wings while on land and walking, essentially, on their knuckles. They could have then employed a “leap-frogging” launch pattern, kicking up first with their hind legs and then with their folded wings, and been airborne in less than one second.

giant insects of the carboniferous

The Carboniferous period gets its name from the vast deposits of coal it left behind. This coal had to come from somewhere, and it did: from the enormous swamps that covered the supercontinent Pangaea, which formed over the course of the Carboniferous. These swamps were full of the most primitive land plants, like horsetails, ferns, and lycopods, but grown to a massive size in the oxygen-rich environment they created.

Estimates have placed the atmospheric oxygen content during the Carboniferous at as high as 35% (oxygen currently makes up 21% of the atmosphere). Scientists believe that this high oxygen content not only allowed plants to attain incredible stature; it also facilitated the existence of other gigantic organisms, including the dragonfly Meganeura, whose wingspan was seventy centimeters (two and a half feet).

Many different species of gigantic dragonfly existed during this period, as well as gargantuan versions of our modern mayfly and, of course, cockroach. Scientists believe that high oxygen levels compensated for the inefficiency of the insects’ respiratory systems, which, unlike humans’, are not centralized and rely on the passive diffusion of air through their tissues. In the lower-oxygen-content atmosphere of today, insects’ respiration is too inefficient to allow their bodies to grow much thicker than (in the dragonfly’s case) a pencil, and indeed, giant insects began to disappear as the Permian period dawned and oxygen levels began to decline.

prehistoric bullwhips

As you may be aware, the first human to break the sound barrier was Chuck Yeager, who did so in a rocket plane in 1947. However, scientists have also known since 1958 that the action of cracking a bullwhip also breaks the sound barrier — the thin, flexible tip of the whip surpasses the speed of sound for an instant, creating a sonic boom.

Here’s where it gets fun: according to a computer simulation created by Microsoft guru Nathan Myhrvold, sauropods, a suborder of dinosaurs that in late Jurassic and early Cretaceous set the records for the largest animals ever to live on land, could theoretically have cracked their tails like whips, creating sonic booms like cannonfire that would have resounded over prehistoric landscapes. Scientists are unsure of the purpose of such noisy displays, but have suggested that they may have played a role in male-male competition or discipline enforcement within a group.