Fly with life-size pterosaurs

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1 / 16 A shadow over the cliffYou stand on a sandstone cliff 70 m above a river plain, late in the Cretaceous. Wait a few seconds and look up: a Quetzalcoatlus glides over your head and its shadow crosses the ground. Walk with WASD, drag to look.

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01
A shadow over the cliff
You stand on a sandstone cliff 70 m above a river plain, late in the Cretaceous. Wait a few seconds and look up: a Quetzalcoatlus glides over your head and its shadow crosses the ground. Walk with WASD, drag to look.
02
As tall as a giraffe
The line-up on the cliff top: a plain human figure 1.7 m tall, a giraffe board 5.7 m tall, a standing Quetzalcoatlus and a Cessna 172 with its 11.0 m wing. At the shoulder the pterosaur and the giraffe are within 25 cm of each other.
03
Hunters on foot
Down on the plain a pair of Quetzalcoatlus walk on all fours past two Alamosaurus. Azhdarchids probably picked small animals off the ground, rather like storks. Neither the pterosaurs nor the sauropods here are the same kind of animal: pterosaurs are not dinosaurs.
04
One arm bone
Most of what is known about Quetzalcoatlus northropi comes from one wing. Its upper arm bone is 544 mm long. Walk close to the half-buried bone to open its card.
05
Over the sea with Pteranodon
You are flying with Pteranodon over the sea that covered central North America. Bank with A and D, dive with W, pull up with S and flap with Space. The flight is a glider model, so the numbers are model values.
06
A colony by the lake
Hamipterus nested in colonies by a lake in what is now Xinjiang, China. Hundreds of eggs were found here, some with embryos inside. The clutch half buried in the sand at the shore is one of the hidden finds.
07
Footprints in Korea
On the mudflat by the lake lies a copy of the Haenam trackway from Uhangri on the south-west coast of Korea: 14 pairs of prints over 7.3 m, made by a pterosaur with wings of about 10 m or more, walking on four limbs.
08
Crests of the Brazilian lagoon
On the south-east shore fly the crested pterosaurs of the Early Cretaceous of Brazil: Tupandactylus with a crest far bigger than its skull, Tapejara, Thalassodromeus, Anhanguera and Tropeognathus, whose wings spanned about 8.3 m.
09
Riding warm air
You are flying with Quetzalcoatlus towards a column of warm air, shown in pale orange. Circle inside it without flapping and the readout shows the climb. Large pterosaurs probably travelled this way, from one rising column to the next.
10
The Solnhofen lagoon
The Late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago. A warm, shallow lagoon with low islands, like the one whose fine limestone at Solnhofen in Germany kept the first pterosaur ever described. Long-tailed Rhamphorhynchus fish over the water.
11
Caught by a fish
On the beach lies a slab with a Rhamphorhynchus at the jaws of a large fish, Aspidorhynchus. Five such fossils are known. The wing seems to have snagged on the fish's teeth, and both animals died.
12
A dinosaur among them
Archaeopteryx walks on the island: a bird, and so a dinosaur. It lived in the same lagoon as the pterosaurs, but the two groups are not closely related. Birds come from dinosaurs; pterosaurs have no living descendants.
13
Mary Anning's cliff
At the foot of the sea cliff a sign marks Dimorphodon, which Mary Anning dug out at Lyme Regis in 1828. It lived about 200 million years ago, earlier than the Solnhofen animals, and is shown here with them.
14
The first pterosaurs
The Late Triassic shore, about 215 million years ago. Eudimorphodon and its relatives are about the size of a crow, and their wings are already complete. Nothing with half a wing has been found.
15
A relative 10 cm tall
On a rock in the wood stands Kongonaphon, a lagerpetid from Madagascar about 10 cm tall. Lagerpetids are the closest known relatives of pterosaurs, and they could not fly.
16
The view from above
Back in the Cretaceous, seen from 320 m up. The map shows the areas and the warm air columns. Click the ground to go anywhere, or press F to fly. The field guide (G) lists all 44 animals, and the challenges (T) keep your stars.

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