'Jurassic Park' got it wrong! Scientists just found that pterosaurs, may have had more wing-shape diversity than current reconstructions allow, changing how we picture ancient flight

You probably already know what a pterosaur looks like: wide, leathery wings stretched tight across the sky, soaring over some prehistoric jungle. That image, made famous by Jurassic Park, has appeared on lunch boxes, textbooks, and movie screens ever since. But that picture may be fundamentally incomplete, according to a new study, ‘Exploring the limits of wing design in pterosaurs, in the journal Paleobiology.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered that the pterosaur wings that scientists have been drawing for over 100 years probably miss a great deal of real-world variety, and that what we think we know about these animals is just the tip of the iceberg.

The original flying machine and why it's so hard to reconstruct
According to the Paleobiology study, led by Benton Walters of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, pterosaurs were the first vertebrates in Earth's history to evolve powered flight. They existed from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous, over a span of more than 150 million years, and ranged in size from animals barely larger than a sparrow to ones with wingspans that rivaled those of small planes. One of them, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, is widely considered among the largest flying animals ever to have lived, with a wingspan estimated between 33 and 36 feet.


But despite their fame, pterosaurs are still profoundly misunderstood. The central problem has troubled paleontologists for generations. No pterosaur fossils have ever preserved the whole shape of the wing, the Paleobiology study says. The membrane, which was the most important part of the wing for flight, was made of soft tissue, and soft tissue is almost never preserved whole in the fossilization process. The few fossils that do preserve some membrane are usually folded, torn, or compressed beyond the point of giving a reliable measurement. Scientists have had to rebuild wing shapes from bone measurements and educated guesses about where the membrane attached to the body, and that’s where the uncertainty stacks up.

79 wing drawings, and they all look the same
To assess the performance of existing reconstructions over time, the Bristol team compiled 79 published wing planform reconstructions from the scientific literature. The Paleobiology study examined eight representative genera and two broader pterosaur groups, spanning animals with wingspans of about 16 inches to giants with wingspans of about 33 feet. Familiar names like Pteranodon, the pterosaur most Americans picture when they hear "pterodactyl," and Quetzalcoatlus were in the sample. Next, the team applied a method called theoretical morphospace, which plots all the possible shapes a wing could theoretically take and then tests where existing reconstructions fit on that map.

The result was spectacular. According to the Paleobiology study, the reconstructions clustered tightly together regardless of species, size, time period, or proposed ecological niche. The wing shapes drawn for a palm-sized pterosaur looked almost the same as those drawn for one the size of a plane. Genera were almost identical to each other. “For a group of animals that existed for over 100 million years and includes both palm-sized and plane-sized animals, you would expect diversity in shape,” Walters noted.

Why wing shape is not a minor detail
This matters because wing shape determines how an animal flies, what habitats it can navigate, and what kind of life it can lead. Today, the lifestyles and wing shapes of birds and bats are closely linked; ocean-going birds have wings that are very different from those of forest-dwelling ones. The consistency of pterosaur reconstructions means important variation is being missed.

Part of the difficulty is that even the rare surviving specimens do not tell the whole story. In a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Pittman and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong showed that soft tissue features relevant to flight, such as muscular structures at the wing root that affected aerodynamic performance, were only visible when fossils were imaged using laser-stimulated fluorescence, a technique that unveils tissue traces invisible to the naked eye. Features not seen for decades only appeared under specialized light.

A 2009 study, ‘The soft tissue of Jeholopterus (Pterosauria, Anurognathidae, Batrachognathinae) and the structure of the pterosaur wing membrane’ by Kellner and colleagues in Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that even the internal structure of the pterosaur wing membrane, including layers of fibers that likely affected the way the membrane flexed and tensed in flight, was far more complex than it appeared on the outside. Such structural detail, missing from most fossils, would have had a meaningful role in shaping what the wing actually looked like in life.

What comes next
Walters believes the image will become clearer as newer imaging techniques become more common. According to the Paleobiology study, imaging tools that use wavelengths beyond human vision are already yielding new information from specimens once thought to offer little. This research is meant as a benchmark, a clear map of where current understanding breaks down, against which future reconstructions can be tested as they are developed.

The “pterodactyl” remains one of the most recognizable prehistoric creatures in American popular culture. But what actually soared through Cretaceous skies remains, at least in part, a mystery, based on the scientific evidence we do have.