{"id":112,"date":"2003-11-04T23:34:53","date_gmt":"2003-11-04T23:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=112"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:42","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:42","slug":"when-smart-winged-reptiles-ruled-the-skies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=112","title":{"rendered":"when smart-winged reptiles ruled the skies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Pterosaurs, the now-extinct flying reptiles that  once dominated the skies (and bad caveman movies), may have been  accomplished and agile aerial predators, report researchers in the Oct.  30 <em>Nature.<\/em> Lawrence  Witmer of the University of Ohio and his colleagues  ran pterosaur skulls through a high-resolution scanner to obtain  digital 3-D reconstructions of the creatures&#8217; brains. Overall, they  found them rather birdlike, but the pterosaurs had much larger floccular  lobes, a  part of the brain that controls movement. (The floccular  lobes took up 7.5 percent of a pterosaur&#8217;s total brain mass, compared to  less than 2  percent in birds.) The researchers propose that the lobes  were so big so they could gather information from the pterosaurs&#8217; vast  and sensitive wing  membranes, helping them build up a detailed map of  the forces the wings  detected. &#8220;Equipped with their `smart&#8217; wings,  pterosaurs would have  excellent flight control. Despite their  antiquity, they could even have  outperformed modern birds and bats,&#8221;  wrote David Unwin of Berlin&#8217;s  Humboldt University, in an accompanying  commentary.<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 11\/04\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pterosaurs, the now-extinct flying reptiles that once dominated the skies (and bad caveman movies), may have been accomplished and agile aerial predators, report researchers in the Oct. 30 Nature. Lawrence Witmer of the University of Ohio and his colleagues ran &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=112\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}