Rhamphorhynchus
Life as a Rhamphorhynchus means a mouth full of forward-pointing needles, a long tail with a small diamond-shaped flag at the tip, and a home among the salty lagoons of Jurassic Europe.
Island lagoons of Bavaria
About 150 million years ago, southern Germany was an archipelago of low islands in a warm, shallow sea. Between the reefs lay still, salty lagoons whose bottom waters were poor in oxygen, so carcasses that sank there were left undisturbed. The resulting fine limestone of Solnhofen and Eichstätt, used for centuries as lithographic stone, has preserved Rhamphorhynchus in exquisite detail, sometimes including wing membranes and the tail vane.
You would not be a dinosaur – pterosaurs were their own group of reptiles – although Archaeopteryx, an early bird and therefore technically a small dinosaur, might have been flapping nearby.
A fishing kit
Rhamphorhynchus belonged to the early, long-tailed pterosaurs. Its jaws carried long, interlocking teeth angled forwards, an ideal trap for slippery prey, and specimens with fish remains in the body cavity confirm the diet. Wingspans ranged from about 30 centimetres in juveniles to roughly 1.8 metres in the rare largest adults. The stiff tail ended in a vane that may have helped with steering and that changed shape as the animal grew.
Growing up alone
Bone-tissue studies indicate that Rhamphorhynchus grew more slowly than birds, taking a few years to reach adult size. The young were probably able to fly early, so as a hatchling you would have been largely on your own from the start.
Danger from below
Several remarkable slabs show a Rhamphorhynchus tangled up with the long-snouted predatory fish Aspidorhynchus. The likely story: the fish lunged at the pterosaur near the surface, its snout snagged in the wing membrane, and both sank together into the toxic lagoon water. In this life, it was not only you who fished – the fish could also catch you.
