On the Nest

©Maurilio Oliveira

Guidraco venator is unique among pterosaurs in a variety of ways. The teeth are actually somewhat common in earlier pterosaurs like Dimorphodon, but the size of Guidraco is more rare for a pterosaur with those type of teeth. In terms of interpretations of Guidraco the animal is unique in that many of the illustrations of this pterosaur do not take place in the air. A number of interpretations do show Guidraco flying but we have not seen any of it diving toward food items, taking off or landing, or participating in any visibly powered flight (i.e. there are no interpretations or illustrations that appear to be showing down or upstrokes of the wings more definitively than they depict soaring. There is nothing wrong with any of these depictions, of course. However, as with any other fossil animal we discuss here, we do like to see a little variation in how animals are depicted because we know that animals engage in dynamic behaviors throughout their lifespans. There are a number of illustrations and interpretations of Guidraco walking on the ground. These are interesting, but not as interesting as the illustration we are looking at today. This illustration combines some odd perspective (like the directly facing Guidraco) and the aforementioned not seen before act of feeding (look in the background) with the pose of a sitting Guidraco and different wing positions which are showing hints of powered flight. It may look as though I set that up earlier in saying that we had not seen those things until now, but an image search with those keywords actually seems to have turned in the perfect storm of an illustration which we should look at in great detail. The behaviors that were, until I found this image, uninterpreted or at least had not been illustrated, represent a substantial portion of the life history of Guidraco and the ideas hypothesized in these representations of their lives can, potentially, tell us a lot about the pterosaur. This illustration also tells us a lot about how the researchers interpreted the life history of Guidraco based on sister taxa and the fossil that was known to them when they described it.