And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind... Genesis 1:24
"A flying reptile with a neck longer than a giraffe’s? 
Could it fly at breakneck speed without breaking its neck?
Like dinosaurs, the flying reptiles collectively grouped as
pterosaurs came in tiny, medium, large and gigantic sizes.
There are no
clear ancestors of pterosaurs, which appear fully formed and flight
capable in the fossil record.
On July 28, 2020, PNAS reported on “A tiny ornithodiran archosaur from the Triassic of Madagascar.” This miniature reptile, Kongonaphon kely
from Madagascar, stood less than 4 inches tall and looks nothing like a
pterosaur, but is thought to be an ancestor to both pterosaurs and
dinosaurs.
Then there’s the three-foot wide pterosaur in the medium category, Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, nicknamed “Monkeydactyl” because of what looks like an opposable thumb in the fossil. Live Science
shows a diagram of the bones in the fossil, along with an artist
reconstruction of its putative ability to climb trees by grasping with
its claw.
At the extreme other end of the size scale, consider Alanqa saharica from Morocco, featured in another article on Live Science. These astonishing pterosaurs as big as airplanes had “absurdly long necks and large heads”
as the artist conception shows.
Indeed, if the artwork is accurate, the
beak of this monster was almost as long as its neck.
Q: How on earth could
it function as a flyer?
A: The answer, scientists at the University of
Portsmouth found by dissecting a neck bone, is that the vertebra were
like bicycle wheels. They were mostly hollow with “spokes” of bone
supporting the central core. This allowed the necks to be lightweight
yet strong, and longer than the neck of a giraffe.
How could they be linked by evolution? Never underestimate the
storytelling prowess of Darwinians. Here’s how PNAS accounts for the
small size of the alleged ancestor:
Analysis of ancestral body size indicates that there was a pronounced miniaturization event near the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Tiny ancestral body size may help explain the origins of flight in pterosaurs and fuzzy integument in both groups.
Assuredly it does not explain the origins. The two creatures look
nothing like one another. The ancestor could not fly, but the
descendants could. Remember how many specific requirements there are for
powered flight? Watch again Flight: The Genius of Birds from
Illustra Media. “You don’t just partly fly,” Paul Nelson says in the
film. It’s an all-or-nothing challenge, and every body part must be
geared to that function." CEH
