I was rummaging through my old dinosaur/prehistoric animal drawings of yore -- ok of when I was a school kid -- and I spotted a rendition of one of the pterosaurs that has always piqued my curiosity, the largest flying creature ever known to us through the fossil record : Quetzalcoatlus.
The sheer size of the creature must have been quite awe-inspiring : a wingspan of 12 metres (40 feet) and a height of close to 4 metres when walking on all fours and at the end of the 1970s, palaeontologists were guessing, according to the incomplete remains found in Texas, that Quetzalcoatlus probably had a lifestyle akin to vultures, feeding on carrion and abandoned carcasses. I still have the first Dinosaur book showing the Quetzalcoatlus, dating from 1977 and bought in 1978.

Well, time has passed and more fossils have been found, with an entire family of pterosaurs called azhdarcids (from the Iranian word for "dragon") created just for the Quetzalcoatlus and other flying reptiles with similar skeletons. Turns out some scientists have studied the remains with even more thoroughess and what has been construed out of the new studies is a a lifestyle more closely related to storks, marabous and jabirus than vultures and condors (although condors are genetically related to storks).

I think that many pterosaurs were far from helpless on the ground, and that flight was probably one of the ways they had for escaping larger predators or for covering large distances to make sure they had sufficient food. It makes more sense to have long beaked and large wingspan pterosaur behave like storks and marabous than vultures or condors. For one, marabou storks have very large wingspans for birds (3 m/ 20 feet) and can spend many hours walking on the ground.

For those paleofreaks like me, here's the link at National Geographic and a flickr album for more eye candy.