Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - How Baby Pterosaurs Met Their Death

Sunday, 7 September 2025

Refuting Creationism - How Baby Pterosaurs Met Their Death - 150 Million Years Before "Eve's Sin"

Lucky II, another hatchling Pterodactylus, preserved as a part and partial counterpart under UV light. Like the other individual, it has a fractured wing, providing rare insight into how even the youngest pterosaurs experienced injuries.

150-million-year post-mortem reveals baby pterosaurs perished in a violent storm | News | University of Leicester

The Bible hints at the notion that human death only entered the world through "The Fall," as seen in Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:22; however, it says nothing about the possibility of plant or animal death prior to that. Setting aside the tautology that humans cannot die before being created, some creationist fundamentalists regard this as a profound New Testament revelation absent from Genesis, inferring that no death whatsoever occurred before the Fall. This interpretation often serves as a psychological counterbalance: death is unpleasant and unexpected in a supposedly perfect, evil-free world.

Creationists need to believe absurdities to cope with believing absurdities.

I'm not concerned about people clinging to absurd delusions for comfort, but what does concern me is the fact, confirmed by recent history, that those capable of believing absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities, often underpinned by the very book from which their delusions derive.

In a recent blog post, I mentioned the absurdity of believing that the food consumed by people or animals somehow remained alive through and after digestion. Additionally, the fossil record unequivocally demonstrates that plants and animals died tens to hundreds of millions of years before creationists' "creation week".

Now, paleontologists from the University of Leicester, led by Robert S. H. Smyth, have shed new light on why two juvenile pterosaurs in the 150-million-year-old Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany died and were preserved in such extraordinary detail. These Solnhofen deposits are known for exquisitely preserved fossils, especially juveniles, but few intact adult remains.

A forensic-style examination revealed broken wing bones on the hatchlings - somewhat ironically nicknamed “Lucky” and “Lucky II” - consistent with storm-induced injuries, possibly from being hurled by powerful winds. These fractures likely prevented flight, causing them to crash into a lagoon, drown, and be rapidly buried by sediment washed in by the same storm—thus preserving them in remarkable fidelity.

These findings explain why juvenile pterosaurs are disproportionately represented in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage: young, relatively flight-inexperienced individuals suffered catastrophic outcomes during storms, while adults—better flyers—were less likely to meet the same fate, and their remains were more likely scavenged or fragmented before preservation.

The Solnhofen Limestone. The Solnhofen Limestone, also known as the Solnhofen Plattenkalk, is a world-famous fossil deposit from the Late Jurassic period, dating to about 150 million years ago (Tithonian stage). It outcrops in Bavaria, southern Germany, and was first quarried extensively for its fine-grained lithographic limestone in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Formation

The limestone formed in a chain of shallow, tropical lagoons along the edge of the ancient Tethys Ocean.
These lagoons were separated from the open sea by reefs and islands, creating restricted, low-oxygen conditions on the lagoon floor.
The lack of oxygen inhibited scavengers and decay, allowing delicate organisms to be preserved. Periodic influxes of carbonate mud, carried by storms and runoff, quickly buried carcasses.

Dating

The age is established through biostratigraphy, particularly using ammonites and other marine index fossils, as well as radiometric calibration against other Upper Jurassic deposits.
Current consensus places the Solnhofen strata in the late Tithonian stage, around 149–150 million years ago.

Palaeontological significance

The Solnhofen Limestone is a Konservat-Lagerstätte, a deposit of exceptional preservation, yielding fossils of soft tissues, feathers, and even stomach contents.
Famous fossils include the early bird Archaeopteryx, numerous crustaceans, jellyfish, insects, fish, and a variety of pterosaurs.
Its preservational detail has made it one of the most studied fossil localities in the world, providing unique insights into Late Jurassic ecosystems.

The team's findings are published, open-access, in Current Biology and are explained in a University of Leicester news item.

150-million-year post-mortem reveals baby pterosaurs perished in a violent storm
The cause of death for two baby pterosaurs has been revealed by University of Leicester palaeontologists in a post-mortem 150 million years in the making.
Detailed in a new study in the journal Current Biology, their findings show how these flying reptiles were tragically struck down by powerful storms that also created the ideal conditions to preserve them and hundreds more fossils like them.

The Mesozoic, or age of reptiles, is often imagined as a time of giants. Towering dinosaurs, monstrous marine reptiles, and vast-winged pterosaurs dominate museum halls and the public consciousness. But this familiar picture is skewed. Just as today’s ecosystems are mostly populated by small animals, so too were ancient ones. The difference? Fossilisation tends to favour the largest and the most robust organisms. Small, fragile creatures rarely make it into the palaeontological record.

On rare occasions, however, nature conspires to preserve the delicate and the diminutive inhabitants of these lost worlds. One of the most famous examples is the 150-million-year-old Solnhofen Limestones of southern Germany. These lagoonal deposits are renowned for their exquisitely preserved fossils, including many specimens of pterosaurs, the flying reptiles of the Mesozoic.

Yet here lies a mystery: while Solnhofen has yielded hundreds of pterosaur fossils, nearly all are very small, very young individuals, perfectly preserved. By contrast, larger, adult pterosaurs are rarely found, and when they are, they’re represented only by fragments (often isolated skulls or limbs). This pattern runs counter to expectations: larger, more robust animals should stand a better chance of fossilisation than delicate juveniles.

Lead author of the study Rab Smyth, from the University of Leicester’s Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution, was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council through the CENTA Doctoral Training Partnership.

Pterosaurs had incredibly lightweight skeletons. Hollow, thin-walled bones are ideal for flight but terrible for fossilisation. The odds of preserving one are already slim and finding a fossil that tells you how the animal died is even rarer.

Robert S.H. Smyth, lead author.
Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution
School of Geography, Geology and the Environment
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.

The discovery of two baby pterosaurs with broken wings has helped to solve this mystery. These tiny fossils, though easily overlooked, are powerful evidence of ancient tropical storms and how they shaped the fossil record.

Ironically nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II by the researchers, the two individuals belong to Pterodactylus, the first pterosaur ever scientifically named. With wingspans of less than 20 cm (8 inches) these hatchlings are among the smallest of all known pterosaurs. Their skeletons are complete, articulated and virtually unchanged from when they died. Except for one detail. Both show the same unusual injury: a clean, slanted fracture to the humerus. Lucky’s left wing and Lucky II’s right wing were both broken in a way that suggests a powerful twisting force, likely the result of powerful gusts of wind rather than a collision with a hard surface.

The hatchling Pterodactylus, nicknamed Lucky, illuminated UV light. Both part and counterpart show the delicate bones of this tiny pterosaur, capturing a fractured wing in extraordinary detail.

Catastrophically injured, the pterosaurs plunged into the surface of the lagoon, drowning in the storm driven waves and quickly sinking to the seabed where they were rapidly buried by very fine limy muds stirred up by the death storms. This rapid burial allowed for the remarkable preservation seen in their fossils.

Like Lucky I and II, which were only a few days or weeks old when they died, there are many other small, very young pterosaurs in the Solnhofen Limestones, preserved in the same way as the Luckies, but without obvious evidence of skeletal trauma. Unable to resist the strength of storms these young pterosaurs were also flung into the lagoon. This discovery explains why smaller fossils are so well preserved – they were a direct result of storms – a common cause of death for pterosaurs that lived in the region.

Larger, stronger individuals, it seems, were able to weather the storms and rarely followed the Luckies stormy road to death. They did eventually die though but likely floated for days or weeks on the now calm surfaces of the Solnhofen lagoon, occasionally dropping parts of their carcasses into the abyss as they slowly decomposed.

For centuries, scientists believed that the Solnhofen lagoon ecosystems were dominated by small pterosaurs, but we now know this view is deeply biased. Many of these pterosaurs weren’t native to the lagoon at all. Most are inexperienced juveniles that were likely living on nearby islands that were unfortunately caught up in powerful storms.

Robert S.H. Smyth.

When Rab spotted Lucky we were very excited but realised that it was a one-off. Was it representative in any way? A year later, when Rab noticed Lucky II we knew that it was no longer a freak find but evidence of how these animals were dying. Later still, when we had a chance to light-up Lucky II with our UV torches, it literally leapt out of the rock at us - and our hearts stopped. Neither of us will ever forget that moment.

Dr David M. Unwin, c-author
Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution and School of Heritage and Culture
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.

Publication:
Smyth, Robert S.H.; Belben, Rachel; Thomas, Richard; Unwin, David M.
Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage
Current Biology (2025) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.006.

Highlights

Humeral fractures in neonatal Pterodactylus suggest injuries sustained during flight
Injuries were caused by the storms that buried these and numerous other small pterosaurs
Catastrophic storm sampling explains marked juvenile preservation bias in Solnhofen
Large pterosaurs are rare or fragmentary due to low background attritional sampling

Summary
The Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Archipelago of Germany has yielded a pterosaur assemblage that has long underpinned and continues to dominate much of our understanding of these flying reptiles. Knowledge of how this assemblage was shaped by processes of fossilization, critical for generating robust paleobiological hypotheses, remains limited. Here, we combine fatal trauma case studies with quantitative taphonomic data to reveal two distinct fossilization pathways. Catastrophic storms played a primary role, preferentially sampling small, immature pterosaurs. Storms caused these pterosaurs to drown and rapidly descend to the bottom of the water column, where they were quickly buried in storm-generated sediments, preserving both their skeletal integrity and soft tissues. Among these storm-sampled individuals, we document two highly immature specimens of Pterodactylus exhibiting similar oblique humeral fractures. These fractures are consistent with excessive wing loading during flight, providing compelling evidence of super-precocial flight capabilities in immature pterosaurs. By contrast, background “attritional” sampling under normal environmental conditions was less influential in generating the Solnhofen pterosaur assemblage. Longer residence times in the water column under normal environmental conditions restricted fossilization of larger pterosaurs, which are typically preserved as fragmentary, disarticulated remains lacking fossilized soft tissues. This bimodal taphonomic model reveals clear size- and taxon-related preservation biases, illustrating how extreme weather events can distort the fossil record. Selective sampling provides a framework for understanding the conditions that favored exceptional soft tissue preservation and offers critical context for evaluating pterosaur growth, flight capabilities, and paleoecology.

Introduction
The Upper Jurassic Solnhofen platy limestones of southern Germany (∼153–148 mya) have yielded more than 500 examples of pterosaurs over the last 250 years.^1,2,3,4 Many specimens are complete, or near complete, and early finds formed the basis of our current understanding of pterosaur skeletal anatomy.^1,2,5,6,7 Much of our knowledge of pterosaur soft tissues, including throat-sacs,^8,9 tail vanes,¹⁰ and the shape and structure of the wing membranes,^{11,12,13,14,15} is derived from Solnhofen specimens, several of which are among the most informative of all pterosaurs.^{9,10,11,14,16}

The Solnhofen assemblage is taxonomically diverse, comprising some 15 species representing at least six distinct lineages, including non-pterodactyliform, basal pterodactyliform, and pterodactyloid clades.^17,18 These pterosaurs have provided a crucible for testing approaches to pterosaur taxonomy^{1,2,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26} and are the principal contributors to character state data for most phylogenetic analyses of pterosaurs.²⁶ Several taxa, notably Rhamphorhynchus muensteri and Pterodactylus antiquus, are represented by relatively continuous postnatal growth series that include neonatal individuals,^21,26,27 likely no more than a few weeks old but capable of flight,^6,28,29 though this idea has been challenged.^27,30,31 Solnhofen pterosaurs have also been principal contributors of data to morphometric analyses^{26,32,33,34,35} as well as studies of feeding ecology.³⁶ They are often treated as a classic example of a pterosaur “fauna,” though the term is misleading, as the assemblage spans several million years and, as argued here, likely contains autochthonous and allochthonous elements.

Preservational biases, though rarely acknowledged, played a fundamental, yet poorly understood role, in shaping all aspects of the paleobiological studies mentioned above. Several generalized taphonomic pathways have been muted,^{1,37,38,39,40,41} but there is little consensus as to which best accounts for the formation of the Solnhofen tetrapod assemblage. Taphonomic study focused on Solnhofen pterosaurs remains limited.^1,42,43 Observations on soft tissue preservation are scattered across the literature,^11,14,16 but there have been no comprehensive systematic accounts. Consequently, in the absence of a coherent taphonomic model for the Solnhofen pterosaur assemblage, paleobiological hypotheses, especially those pertaining to soft tissue anatomy, ontogeny, and paleoecology, remain unconstrained and susceptible to misinterpretation.

Here we report two previously undescribed neonates of Pterodactylus antiquus, both exhibiting perimortem forelimb fractures. These specimens, together with quantitative data from over 40 individuals of Pterodactylus, offer new insights into two distinct taphonomic modes (catastrophic and attritional) that account for the preservation patterns observed in Solnhofen pterosaurs. To test the broader applicability of this model, we also conducted quantitative analyses of other abundant and well-sampled Solnhofen pterosaur groups: ctenochasmatoid pterodactyloids closely related to Pterodactylus and the more basal, non-pterodactyloid Rhamphorhynchus. Our results show that most pterosaurs are preserved predominantly through catastrophic events, often reflecting mass mortality episodes. By contrast, Rhamphorhynchus exhibits a uniquely attritional taphonomic signature, characterized by the gradual accumulation of individuals over time. These findings underpin a generalized catastrophic-attritional taphonomic (CATT) model, which provides a robust framework for reassessing the paleobiology of Solnhofen pterosaurs and other vertebrates from this iconic Lagerstätte.

Once again, the evidence from the rocks tells a very different story to that of the creationist imagination. Far from a world in which death was an alien intrusion only after some mythical lapse in Eden, the Earth has always been a place where living things died, decayed, and sometimes—under exceptional circumstances—were preserved as fossils. The Solnhofen Limestone gives us a snapshot of that process, showing not only that animals died long before humans, but also how the violence of storms and the contingencies of burial shaped what we see today.

What creationists dismiss as a “fallen world” is in fact the only world there has ever been: one governed by natural forces, where life and death are inseparable parts of the same process. Death was not an afterthought, nor a punishment—it is the price of life, and without it, evolution, adaptation, and the richness of the living world would not exist.

And so, with every new discovery like these unfortunate baby pterosaurs, the gap between scientific reality and creationist fantasy widens. Fossils testify, again and again, to deep time and a history utterly incompatible with a few thousand years of imagined perfection. Yet rather than face the evidence, creationists are forced to pile absurdity upon absurdity. For the rest of us, though, these fossils are not a problem to explain away, but a window into a past that makes sense only through science.

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