PhD study finds new clues about pterosaur diets

[Ravonium]

A new PhD study, analysing the teeth of 11 pterosaur species, has found out some potential clues about their diets.


Link to the article on this subject: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00080-y

[stargatedalek]

None of this actually comes as news, frankly I don't think anyone who knew what they were saying has claimed Dimorphodon was a piscivore in decades.

[WarrenJB]

Yeah, what SGD said. It's interesting to see the conclusions and anticipate what the method might uncover in future (gonna be honest, I thought it was going to be about carbon isotopes) but the writer of the article has the 'overturning cherished ideas' bit followed by a lot  of 'confirming what scientists thought'.

[suspsy]

None of this actually comes as news, frankly I don't think anyone who knew what they were saying has claimed Dimorphodon was a piscivore in decades.

Yeah, when I was reading up on Dimorphodon for my review of the 2017 CollectA figure, I didn't come across any claims about it eating fish.

[Halichoeres]

There is value in providing statistical support for informed speculation. Just because a result doesn't surprise you doesn't mean it's nothing new; what is new is the use of micro-wear to validate hunches, which had the potential to falsify those hunches. The choice of Dimorphodon-as-fish-eater in this short write-up of the paper is unfortunate, but 'twas ever thus in summaries of academic papers.

[ZoPteryx]

I'm more interested in the omnivorous Pterodactylus the article mentions!  I wonder, do they truly mean omnivorous, as in eating plants+animals, or do they just mean it was a generalist carnivore? 

[stargatedalek]

I'm more interested in the omnivorous Pterodactylus the article mentions!  I wonder, do they truly mean omnivorous, as in eating plants+animals, or do they just mean it was a generalist carnivore? 

That's the problem, this article is so written that it's hard to tell how versed this person is or how much they deviated from the paper itself. It could very well be that they think eating terrestrial vertebrates and fish/insects makes something an omnivore.