The international team comprised of experts from the universities of Cape Town, Leicester, Portsmouth and Casablanca. Lead author, Roy Smith, from the University of Portsmouth's School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, worked on the study with scientists from Africa and the UK. It had been previously thought that the smaller species of pterosaurs were outcompeted by newly evolving birds, but this research has found that it was actually the babies of giant pterosaurs - known as flaplings - who overshadowed their small adult rivals. Pterosaurs were the flying cousins of dinosaurs - some were as large as a Spitfire fighter plane and others as small as a thrush.ĭuring the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 252 - 145 million years ago, pterosaurs reached only modest sizes, but by the Late Cretaceous period many were giants - some with a wingspan of 10 metres or more.
