/ 24 March 2010

Wonderful winged things

Wonderful Winged Things

She makes pots and mosaics, loves reading and thinks motherhood is the best thing since sliced bread — and happens to be one of South Africa’s top palaeobiologists.

Meet Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, dinosaur queen extraordinaire and a guest lecturer at this year’s SciFest Africa, who is sure to sell out Grahamstown’s Olive Shreiner Hall with her talk on the evolution of vertebrate flight.

‘It’s called ‘Things with Wings’,” the ebullient mother-of-two says, giggling. ‘I wanted an exciting sounding title because my talk is going to be just that — Exciting with a capital ‘E’ and packed with amazing information and some breathtaking pictures.”

Certainly the subject matter is something close to Chinsamy-Turan’s heart. She’s just mad about winged things — and especially pterosaurs, incredible flying reptiles that ruled the skies 200-million years ago during the reign of the dinosaurs.

Flight is a subject that has fascinated humankind since its earliest beginnings. Our prehistoric hominid ancestors undoubtedly looked at the creatures of the air with the same sense of awe and wonder that we do, marvelling at these animals’ ability to escape the terrestrial world and adapt to life on the wing.

‘True flight, as opposed to the ability to glide, has evolved only three times among vertebrates — creatures, like us, with backbones — since time began,” says Chinsamy-Turan.

First came the pterosaurs. They were as fascinating as their names are long — Dimorphodon, Quetzalcoatlus, Pterodaustro and Rhamphorhynchus may twist tongues and sound overly scientific, but most pterosaurs are still lovingly referred to by layfolk as ‘pterodactyls” and bring to mind the image of Pteranodon, a huge flying dinosaur-type creature made famous in the movie Jurassic Park III.

But pteranodon was only one of a number of different kinds of pterosaur, says Chinsamy-Turan, who has won the prestigious SABC2/Shoprite Checkers South African Woman of the Year award and the department of science and technology’s Distinguished Woman Scientist award.

‘They came in all shapes and sizes,” she says. ‘Some were as small as our modern-day sparrows, but the majority were medium-size with wingspans of between three and four metres. However, there were some enormous pterosaurs.

Take Quetzalcoatlus, for example. This pterosaur had a phenomenal 15.5m wingspan! That makes him the size of a fighter jet!” But were pterosaurs true fliers? Yes, says Chinsamy-Turan.

‘Looking at their pectorial skeletal structure we find that pterosaurs have remarkable similarity to our modern-day birds, which leads us to think that they may have shared similar physical adaptations to flight,” she says.

‘However, pterosaurs were not as terrestrial as birds in that they were very clumsy on the ground, much like bats are. In this respect they share similar flight adaptations with bats — skeletally they have one single digit, which is elongated and which supports a wing membrane. In bats all of the digits, save one, are elongated to support the wing membrane.

‘In birds, of course, all of the digits have fused and the feathers form the wing surface and, like the small dinosaurs they evolved from, they walk or hop in an upright position, whereas pterosaurs, like bats, crawled on all fours.”

In her lecture Chinsamy-Turan will look at these similarities and differences as she examines the ‘flying kits” of pterosaurs, birds and bats and enlightens the audience about the changes in these vertebrates that enabled them to conquer the air.

‘Birds took to the skies about 70-million years ago,” she says. ‘Since then they have diversified into myriad different shapes, forms and types. And they boast more colours and variety than Paris fashion runways.”

Indeed, birds’ prehistoric ‘cousins”, the pterosaurs, shared their sometimes outlandish accoutrement, says Chinsamy-Turan. When she’s not delivering lectures at SciFest, Chinsamy-Turan is a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Cape Town.

She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book, The Microstructure of Dinosaur Bone — Deciphering biology through fine scale analysis, and a children’s book focusing exclusively on African dinosaurs, Famous Dinosaurs of Africa.

She is looking forward to the opening of the Hall of African Dinosaurs at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, which takes place on May 29.

‘We have some great casts of some truly famous South African dinosaurs,” she says. ‘It’s going to be a great exhibit and I can’t wait to see it. ”

Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan’s ‘Things with Wings” lecture will be in the Olive Shreiner Hall on Saturday March 27 at 9.30am.