Meet The Quetzalcoatlus, The Giraffe-Sized Pterosaur That Was The Largest Flying Dinosaur To Ever Live

Every Quetzalcoatlus fossil that exists was unearthed from Big Bend National Park. While there has been a frustrating scarcity, these remnants have all been safely secured at Lawson’s alma mater. But excavations have been slow going.

“You have these sort of potato chip-like bones preserved in very hard rock, and you’ve got to remove the bones from the rock without destroying them,” explained Matthew Brown, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

And this year, a new generation of researchers reviewed the fossils in a monograph of five papers that purports to show definitively that Quetzalcoatlus flew — and exactly how it managed to do so.