Pterodactyl fossil reveals complex flight

Makes you wonder why they died out, and birds did not...

That looks like a flying monkey.

The first question that comes to my mind is, if these were in fact the first flying animals how could they have such complex flight. I was under the impression that according to the laws of "evolution" the first flyers would have had rudimentary flight capabilities.

The first question that comes to my mind is, if these were in fact the first flying animals how could they have such complex flight. I was under the impression that according to the laws of "evolution" the first flyers would have had rudimentary flight capabilities. This specimen was not the first flying animal, they don't give a date range for this one, but they were present up until the end of the dinosaurs. Aside from this species going extinct, a side order of birds also went out around the same time.

I've been wondering when we'd start seeing more results coming out from this. As far as being the first flying animal. Dinosaurs, in the form you think of when someoen says the word, are thought to have started showing up somewhere around 230 million years ago. The Paleozoic covered about a 300 million year span before that. A wee bit of a stretch to assume there were no winged animals during that 300 million years?