Quetzalcoatlus (meaning “feathered serpent god lizard”) was a genus of giant pterosaur, possessing an 13-15 meter (43-50 foot) wingspan and weighing 250 kg. It was the largest pterosaur of all Earth's history and thus the largest known flying vertebrate on Earth.
Quetzalcoatlus lived 70-66.04 million years ago in North America, making it one of the last pterosaur species to exist as well. It was long thought Quetzalcoatlus probably fed on carrion as well as hunting cephalopods, fish, and crustaceans in the shallow seas of the Late Cretaceous North America. But new research by Mark Witton and Darren Naish revealed that they were actually giraffe-shaped, stork-like creatures, terrestrial stalkers that fed on small animals they picked up off the ground.
In the series[]
Walking with Dinosaurs[]
Death of a Dynasty In the last episode of Walking with Dinosaurs, a Quetzalcoatlus is shown taking a drink while being stalked by a Deinosuchus; still, its primary role was to be the token pterosaur of that episode, for which the narrator explained that the skies of the future would belong to the birds.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Quetzalcoatlus model in Walking with Dinosaurs is an edit of that of Ornithocheirus. The model lacks the dual crests on the beak and has a thinner neck than the Ornithocheirus model, but everything else was the same.
- Because it is an edit of Ornithocheirus, the Quetzalcoatlus model is drastically inaccurate.
- This is the only creature to appear in both the WWD 3D movie and the TV series.
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