Pterosaurs take flight from the sands of time
The discovery of a number of fossils at a site in northwestern China was a closely guarded secret for nearly 10 years. Now, the ancient relicts are set to go on display, as Cheng Yingqi reports from Hami prefecture, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
About 100 kilometers south of Hami, a prefecture in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is an area known as "The Demon's Castle", named after the striking sand dunes and weird structures formed by the winds that have battered this barely populated, seemingly endless stretch of the Gobi Desert for millennia.
About 120 million years ago, however, the region in northwestern China was a vast lake, teeming with life and home to a large number of reptiles, mostly pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to master powered flight and that dominated the skies more than 70 million years before the first birds. Some scientists believe that if the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and related species about 65 million years ago had not occurred, pterosaurs may have evolved.
