This blog post summarizes a new paleontological study showing that intense tropical cyclones in the late Jurassic played a lethal role for newly hatched pterosaurs.
Using tiny, exquisitely preserved specimens from Germany’s Solnhofen Limestones, researchers reconstructed how violent storm winds likely blew fragile juvenile Pterodactylus into a lagoon, where rapid mud burial created the rare conditions needed for fossilization.
Storms, fossils and a fresh look at Solnhofen
The research focused on two hatchling pterosaurs nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II, and used ultraviolet imaging to reveal previously hidden damage to their bones.
These findings overturn older ideas that the Solnhofen lagoon hosted resident populations of small pterosaurs and instead point to episodic storm events as a major driver of the fossil assemblage.
The tiny specimens that changed a big story
As a paleontologist with three decades of field and lab experience, I find the preservation of these hatchlings remarkable.
The fossils, only days or weeks old at death, retain delicate features despite having hollow, fragile bones that usually decay or are scavenged quickly.
Lucky and Lucky II come from the same famous Jurassic horizon that has produced more than 500 pterosaur fossils.
Most are small and extraordinarily delicate; until now, this was often interpreted as evidence of resident small-bodied species.
The new interpretation—juveniles driven from nesting islands by storms—explains both the abundance and the consistent preservation style.
How UV light unlocked the past
Researchers applied ultraviolet light to the specimens, a technique that highlights bone damage and soft-tissue traces not visible under normal lighting.
Under UV, the pterosaurs showed broken and displaced wing elements consistent with violent gusts rather than blunt-force impacts from collisions.
These fractures and disarticulations, coupled with sedimentological evidence, suggest the animals were swept into a shallow lagoon during a storm and rapidly entombed by mud deposits.
Rapid burial is crucial: it limits scavenging and bacterial decay, giving even the most delicate skeletons a chance to fossilize for more than 150 million years.
Why this matters for paleoecology and taphonomy
This study refines our understanding of sampling bias in the fossil record.
Exceptional deposits like Solnhofen are windows into past life, but they are also filtered by the processes that create them—storms in this case.
Storm-driven mortality and the fossil assemblage
The implications are significant:
- Ecological interpretation: Many small pterosaur fossils from Solnhofen likely represent transported juveniles rather than in situ small species.
- Taphonomic bias: Extreme weather produced both mortality and the rapid burial needed for exceptional preservation. Weather events shaped what we can study millions of years later.
- Behavioral insights: The fragile state of the bones indicates these animals were newly hatched. This provides rare information about early pterosaur life history and vulnerability.
Understanding such biases helps paleontologists avoid overinterpreting species diversity from concentration-rich sites.
It also highlights the value of multidisciplinary approaches—combining UV imaging, sedimentology, and careful anatomical study—to reconstruct ancient events.
Here is the source article for this story: Tropical storms killed these baby flying reptiles 150 million years ago, study finds