They ruled the skies for 150 million years, until about 65 million year ago. We've only seen them fly in movies like Jurassic World, but extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs (Greek for "wing lizard") stand out for their evolutionary success. Today, paleontologists like Kevin Padian at the University of California, Berkeley, gush about these flying animals. He says, "Pterosaurs were just the coolest things that were ever in the air." 

Now, pterosaurs may help us humans soar to new heights. They're inspiring the design of remarkable new aircraft like none seen before.

Don't Call Them 'Dinosaurs'

"Technically, pterosaurs are not members of the dinosaur family," explains Liz MartinSilverstone. She's a paleobiologist at England's University of Bristol. "They are a related kind of reptile." Pterosaurs went extinct at the same time as dinosaurs. "Yet pterosaurs were far from failures," Martin-Silverstone says. "They were the first vertebrates [animals with backbones] to fly. They flew 60 million years before birds." Some pterosaurs flew only short distances, while others may have been long-distance flyers. Some even had webbed feet, likely to take off and land on water. "Pterosaurs ranged in size from as small as a dove to wingspans of 10 or 11 meters [33 to 36 feet], as big as an airplane-a much greater size range than birds," Martin-Silverstone says. They were the equivalent in size to a range of flying devices that we humans design today, from small hand-held drones to private planes.