Flying Archosaurs: Deciphering the Physiological Correlates of Sky Conquest

The first vertebrate animals were jawless marine organisms which appeared in the fossil record over 500 million years ago.

These lineages diversified and eventually crept ashore leading to further evolutionary divergence and become the charismatic living groups.

The evolution of limbs in one lineage of vertebrates set the stage for these vertebrates to colonize landmasses around 320 million years ago.

The water-terrestrial transition included some chalenges, such as air breathing, sustain the body weight dealing with gravity force and avoid the dehydration. On land, vertebrates radiated evolutionarily into many of the vacant niches. Well-adapted on terrestrial enviroment was the time to the aerial conquest.

The extant flying vertebrates are the birds and bats, but pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to rule Mesozoic skies. These three groups evolved convergently to power their wings and increase the metabolic capacity during the flight.

The origin of vertebrate flight is still unclear there is a dicothomy debate discussing whether it evolved from glidind or flapping ancestors.

There are discordancies between the experts, some studies indicated pterosaurs as ground-based at hatchling and others suggested a powered flight in early life for these flying reptiles.

Herein, this project will create a new method to explore the origin of the flight in vertebrates investigating the metabolic challenges of the pionner group to accomplish this ability: the archosaurs.