it's not like pterosaurs were always bigger than birds.
Were they just more poorly adapted to living?
How the fuck did the asteroid kill every pterosaur but leave 2-5 bird lineages alive?
it's not like pterosaurs were always bigger than birds.
Were they just more poorly adapted to living?
I woud like to ask the same question about marine reptiles, why does crocodiles and sea turtles survived but not mosasaurs and plesiosaurs? Why would they go extinct exactly at the same time as dinosaurs? Some of them must have survived until the Paleogene.
Luck of the draw, very few birds survived as well. Being able to better regulate body heat probably gave the surviving birds an edge though.
Crocodiles can survive for a very long time without food and can scavenge rotting meat.
Mosasaurs were apex predators which are always the hardest hit in extinction events because of food web collapses. In particular it seems that many Mosasaurs preyed upon ammonites which went completely extinct during the KPG extinction event. Crocodilians can exploit multiple food sources and go long periods of time without eating, and sea turtles are also less picky eaters than mosasaur and plesiosaurs were so they managed to survive. That being said though, there are still many group of crocodilians and turtles, as well as mammals, went extinct at the same time.
Why are you showing an image of pterosaurs that have been extinct for between 60 and 70 million years prior to the K-Pg event? The rise of the enantiornithean birds likely put the Anurognathids in a very vulnerable position and was probably a factor in why they went extinct. Other small pterosaurs lasted longer, but by the end of the Cretaceous they basically didn't exist. Birds were just better at the small niches than pterosaurs.
Niches were closed
Their beaks allow them to utilise a higher diversity of food sources. They also probably occupied more different environments, like ground-nesting birds on forest floors, swimming birds etc.
>swimming birds
penguins?
what about mammals, were they also on seedS?
Birds feed on seed, so there was food for them after the asteroid impact
Pterosaurs fuck and suck
Bird body plan was more efficient
All of the bird lineages that survived were seed specialists.
you trying to tell me insect specialists wouldn't have had enough food..?
Insects were like 3 feet long they also died
Yes. There was essentially 5 years of winter after Chixulub. The birds who specialized on insects were toothed birds and they all went extinct, as did the small pterosaurs.
There is an almost complete floral turnover at the K/T boundary, basically every plant living the day before chixulub, across the entire planet, was dead by the time the dust cloud settled. The forests that didn’t burn rotted.
Many did, but being burrowers, they also had access to roots and such. In places, there was also a surfeit of carrion, but obviously it’s hard to make that stretch for a time span of years. The animals that survived were ones that could hibernate or estivate and the ones that could eat durable foods that were available in sufficient supply to last for years.
Weren't pterosaurs on the decline before the asteroid? I mean, from what I remember, most of the remaining pterosaurs were absolutely massive.
Smaller ones were, yes, and large animals obviously don't do well in cataclysmic events.
most of the pterosaurs at the end of the mesozoic were considerably large, mostly because the smaller pterosaur species were slowly outcompeted by birds throughout the cretaceous.
This.
¯_ (ツ)_/¯