Since heavy snow still covers most of the Front Range trails, we opted for a visit to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science today. Long famous for its wildlife dioramas, this magnificent institution has recently received kudos for its recovery of numerous Pleistocene fossils from a lake bed near Snowmass, Colorado; the skeletal remains of mammoths, mastodons, ancestral camels, ancestral bison and numerous other animals were unearthed last summer before the reservoir was refilled.
Today, we arrived just in time to see an IMAX film produced by National Geographic and narrated by the renowned naturalist, David Attenborough. Given the odd title of The Flying Monsters, apparently chosen to attract young visitors, this 3-D film covered the natural history of pterosaurs, from their initial appearance in the Triassic, some 200 million years ago, until their disappearance at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 MYA. Thought to have evolved from lizards that used webbed limbs to glide between trees, pterosaurs had an elongated digit on each forefoot which was connected to the ipsilateral leg by a thin membrane. Early pterosaurs were not much larger than lizards while giraffe-sized pterodons had appeared by the late Cretaceous; through the course of their evolution, pterosaurs lost their long tails and developed a limited ability to walk on their hands (located at the bend of each wing) and feet, offering some capacity to feed on land as well as in the air. Some pterodons, equipped with a large head fin, also may have preyed on fish, sailing across the surface of the sea.
While pterosaurs disappeared with terrestrial dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous, the film suggested that their demise may not have been solely related to a massive meteor strike; rather, the rise of birds, more agile on land and in the air, may have sealed their fate. Though pterosaurs were extinct for almost 65 million years before humans appeared, the film provided a splendid introduction to those fascinating creatures and, through the magic of 3-D photography and computer animation, allowed the audience to fly with them.
