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With
the growing number of feathered theropods, and the questions precipitated
about size and diets, it is interesting to consider if the small taxa, and
similarly-sized pterosaurs in the heavily canopied rainforests and
broad-leaved evergreen woodlands, were pollinators. They could, as well,
have been competing for nutrients in nectar with the flying social (and
not-so-social) insects. A small, hungry theropod (say, roughly crow-sized)
would eat the insects and nectar if other prey was not readily
available.
A book, which should be in the
library of all dinosaur students, is:
Lars
Chittka & J.D. Thomson, eds., 2001. Cognitive ecology of
pollinators: animal behavior and floral evolution (Cambridge
University Press), 344pp.
If my theorizing is correct, then pterosaurs could not
have been pollinators. It seems to me that pterosaurs were "top
heavy", and therefor clumsy at landings. I believe they were probably
restricted to landing on flexible cycad or palm branches rather than the
more stiff gymnosperm and angiosperm variety. I don`t think they could make
a precise landing on a stiff branch, as a bird (with well developed
acrocoracoid process) could. A bird could hover, and break its fall just
before landing. Though some pterosaurs (the anurognathids) might have fed
upon flying insects, I doubt that they nested in flowering
trees.
Another point of contention is that
there may not have been any insect eating pterosaurs by the end of the
Cretaceous (perhaps outcompeted by birds?). If there were, one might have
expected to see some survive past the K-T boundary, as many small
insect-eating forms seem to have done.
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