Pterosaurs...sort of

A couple of weeks ago the scientific podcast that is Science...sort of ran a piece on this pterosaur paper of mine. Unfortunately, despite their normal sterling efforts, this wasn't really an accurate representation of pterosaurs or our research. Happily though, they were receptive to me pointing this out and were kind enough to immediately invite me and Ross Elgin onto the show to talk pterosaurs. That podcast is now up and you can drop in at this link here to hear us pontificate about those lovely flying reptiles and our work on them and of course giving Pterosaur.net a bit of promotion.

Catching up

While we do try on Pterosaur.net to bring you the best of new pterosaur research, the fact that most of us blog independently of this site and have various other commitments means we aren't always quite as prompt as we should be, even for big stories. Thus while between us we did cover the amazing new specimen of a Darwinopterus preserved in association with an egg in several ways, we never actually wrote about it on here.

This specimen was described by longtime P.net friend Lu Jungchang (pictured above in front of his poster of a putative male and female Darwinopterus by our own Mark Witton) who also organised the 2010 pterosaur meeting in Beijing. 'JC' has been kind enough to let us use various photos of his specimens in the past and in this case let me have some extra photos for my post on this topic over at the Archosaur Musings. Meantime, Darren Naish has been blogging on the implications for pterosaur dimoprhism and behaviour over on Tetrapod Zoology so check them out for more details.

If you do want something a bit more recent though, I'm back at the IVPP in Beijing temporarily and lots of pterosaur specimens are currently on display. That lets me start up a special 'Pterosaur Week' so keep coming back on my site for the next few days and you can begin your tour with Haopterus.