Giant lizards learnt to fly over millions of years

Pterodactyls and related winged reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs steadily improved their ability to fly, becoming the deadly masters of the sky, over the course of millions of years. A new study, '150 million years of sustained increase in pterosaur flight efficiency' , published in the journal Nature has shown that pterosaurs - a group of creatures that became Earth's first flying vertebrates - evolved to improve their flight performance over their 150 million-year existence, before going extinct at the same time as dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Scientists from the Universities of Reading, Lincoln and Bristol carried out the most detailed study yet into how animals evolve over time to become better suited to their environments. They combined fossil records with a new model of flight, based on today's living birds, to measure their flight efficiency and fill in gaps in our knowledge of their evolutionary story. The scientists were able to track the gradual evolution of pterosaurs and demonstrate they became twice as good at flying over the course of their history. They also showed their evolution was caused by consistent small improvements over a long period, rather than sudden evolutionary bursts as had been previously suggested. Professor Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading and lead author of the study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, said: "Pterosaurs were a diverse group of winged lizards, some were the size of sparrows while others had the wingspan of a light aircraft.