Four implications by Venetoraptor’s existence

Venetoraptor gassenae by Connor Ashbridge.

By now, everyone might have heard off the lagerpetid Venetoraptor gassenae, often touted as the pterosaurian missing link. Do note that it is still recovered deeply among lagerpetids, the sister group to pterosaurs, though if lagerpetids turn out to be paraphyletic it could easily end up as such. Key ingredients for this assumption are the large fourth digit (thus seen as a precursor to the pterosaurian wingfinger), the two dewclaps that combined with the large hands might imply arboreality and the beak at the end of its jaw tips.

There are a few things nobody seems to have noticed, however, and I find that fascinating. So lets dive in.

1. Fourth digit claw

The fourth digit of Venetoraptor has a massive claw, like the rest of its digits. This is typical for lagerpetids but unusual among archosaurs as a whole, suggesting that the lack of claws in digits IV and V in dinosaurs and pseudosuchians is not an ancestral condition of Archosauria, or that lagerpetids and a few others groups reaquired this claw. The earliest pterosaur wingfingers may very well have ended with a claw, as Mark Witton’s reconstruction in his book.

2. The sifaka-like locomotion

Lagerpetids and early pterosaurs both are adapted to hopping. Venetoraptor has hindlimbs so large that it has been suggested to be a biped. Combined with the suggested arboreality, this animal likely hopped from tree to tree or from ground to trees and vice versa. It is close in size to sifakas as well, though possibly more carnivorous if the large handclaws and hooked beak are anything to go by.

This has huge implications for the development of powered flight, as pterosaurs have in particular evidence for deriving from hopping forms. Rather than gliding, hopping might have been more relevant to the origin of flight.

3. That beak

The beak is often discussed, but rarely in the context of pterosaur evolution. Many pterosaurs have an “odontoid process”: that is, effectively a hook at the end of the jaws acting as an additional tooth. Venetoraptor‘s beak, if similarly restricted to the end of otherwise toothy jaws, might put the odontoid process as an ancestral pterosaurian trait.

4. Pterosaurs could had been bat winged

Finally, we gotta talk about the hands of the animal. Though the fourth digit is the longest, all digits are large, and so if Venetoraptor does represent a transitional stage to pterosaurs it’s strange that the flying reptiles ended with only a single wingfinger and progressively reduced the clawed digits. This has several implications for the ontological development of the pterosaurian wing, much as simple gene switches created the bat wing.

Conclusion

Venetoraptor is a truly remarkable specimen, and I hope I can stirr further discussion with these points.