Chances were good that prey snared in the sight of a soaring pterodactyl was as good as dead as soon as it was spotted, according to scientists who used sophisticated scanners and computer graphics to digitally reconstruct the brains of the extinct flying reptiles. "It gives us a window into the behavior of these animals in a way we never thought possible," said Lawrence Witmer, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio University in Athens. Based on an analysis of the reconstructions and comparisons to alligators and birds, the closest living relatives of pterosaurs, Witmer and colleagues suggest in the October 30 issue of the journal Nature that the ancient flying reptiles had eagle-like eyesight and precision flight control. These skills, said Witmer, allowed pterosaurs to lock their gaze on prey as they performed complex aerial maneuvers to make the kill.

"The new work clarifies several aspects of pterosaur neural anatomy and prompts some startling new ideas regarding their locomotion and behavior," writes David Unwin, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany, in an accompanying article.

View: Full Article | Source: National Geographic

How can you digitally reconstruct their brains?

Aaaah! Pet peeve! Lol, ignore me, because I know it's very annoying that a) I correct people on this, and I'm sad enough to know...but pterosaurs weren't dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were strictly land animals, set apart from other reptiles in that their legs were in a straight line from their body (as opposed to splayed to spread body weight, like other reptiles).

Pterosaurs, and aquatic reptiles were just phrehistoric reptiles that shared the period with them...but weren't actually dinosaurs. That's why every site on dinosaurs that actually knows what it's talking about (the article above included), refers to them as 'flying-reptiles' instead.