Some of these early pterosaurs also may have had feathers, as the Tupandactylus imperator fossils found in Brazil revealed. That wingspan is about the size of a Cessna four-seat airplane. They started out as smaller, flying creatures and gradually evolved into a larger species with wingspans of more than 33 feet, like the Hatzegopteryx thambema and Quetzalcoatlus northopi. The group of reptiles, including pterodactyls, evolved before dinosaurs. Not all creatures we often think of as dinosaurs, are dinosaurs - the whole line of flying creatures known as pterosaurs, for example. “The same way that humans are apes, are the way that birds are dinosaurs,” says Eugenia Gold, a paleontologist at Suffolk University in Boston. Or did they? The truth is, all birds that walk, swim or fly across our planet are technically dinosaurs, descended from giant creatures in the same family as Tyrannosaurus Rex. But after the six-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth on the northern end of the present-day Yucatan Peninsula, at the end of the Cretaceous Period about 66 million years ago, they went extinct. They first appeared in the Triassic Period about 250 million years ago, and rose to prominence in the Jurassic Period that followed. Dinosaurs ruled the world for about 165 million years, towering over most other land animals.
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