Extinct Birds Is bird evolving to replace the extinct pterosaur?

Question by Adie R: Is bird evolving to replace the extinct pterosaur?
assalamualaikum to all my Muslim friends and hello everyone.All I know is bird and pterosaur are both from dinosaur lineage but both of them are not directly related to one another.According to the law of natural selection,a species evolved into a new breed of living organism either to adapt with the geological and climatical changes in their habitats or to replace some extinct species of animals and take over their food chain.

So is it possible that a group of typical,flightless dinosaurs evolved into what we call as birds to take over the cycle of food chain that were left by the nearly extinct pterosaurs long time ago?Is it possible also for us to conclude that pterosaur are the type of dinosaurs is the first to go extinct then followed by other dinosaur species?I mean,the ‘first’ bird evolved from a flightless dinosaur.So I think it must be the pterosaur-type dinosaurs that go extinct first,right?

Best answer:

Answer by trevor_dykes
Greetings from a non-Muslim.

It seems very likely that pterosaur decline and bird diversification effected each other. These events were happening at the same time. For example, n the German fauna of Solnhofen, Upper Jurassic, a few birds turn up among much more numerous pterosaurs. In later ages pterosaur numbers sink and birdies take to the skies (and waters).

There is a slight problem that needs to be kept in mind. The fossil record is heavily biased towards conditions that happened to be good for fossilisation. The number of coastal sites is heavily over-represented, and some sorts of environment are only pooly represented or totally absent. Therefore, while there’s a good level of information available on the seaside communities, it shouldn’t be thought of as typical for the entire world of that age.

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More or less, except pterosaurs are too distantly related to be classed as dinosaurs as such. By the end of the Cretaceous pterosaurs had already become rare. None at all have been found from after the Cretaceous. As birds obviously did survive beyond the Cretaceous, as evidence by me seeing some out the window, pterosaur extinction certainly occurred before bird extinction. There are at least 9,000 species of bird merrily fluttering about today (or swimming or running in some odd cases).

The extinction of birds doesn’t seem likely in the near future. Apart from anything else, a few species have had the luck to appeal to the appetites of strange critters called people, and we’d not want them all to go extinct. They’re too tasty.

Update
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Many pterosaurs display specialisations for catching fish whereas no bats do. Some fruit bats have been caught occasionally fishing in rivers, but they’ve no specialisations for it. Fruit bats mainly eat fruit, thus the name, and the more widespread varieties concentrate on insects, especially moths. In general, the above sentence is radically wrong.

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The oldest known certain bat fossils date from the Eocene, while some less clear cut cases may be Paleocene. Pterosaurs would’ve also needed to be alive to be out-competed by bats, but none are known beyond the Cretaceous. As far as is known, the oldest bats appeared millions of years after the most recent pterosaurs.

What do you think? Answer below!

Tags:bird, Birds, evolving, Extinct, pterosaur, replace