#7, Lucky 7 on our list of weird dinosaurs
Jeholopterus
JAY-hole-OP-ter-us
This guy is so cute, I think we'll call him Joel!
Joel grew to have a wingspan of three feet and weighed somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds.
Joel was a flying reptile with really large sharp claws and a cat-like head ( thought one paleontologist) who probably ate bugs for his main course and may have stayed on the backs of large dinosaurs sucking their blood a lot like a vampire bat!
Joel is a very interesting fellow because of the theories about his anatomy. One man, David Peters studied the images of the fossils of Joel and thought the pterosaur to have the ability to deliver a strong blow, and a method to lock the fangs into another animal after
striking. All these features led Peters to suggest
Jeholopterus
latched onto the backs of sauropods and lapped up blood from fang
wounds. Peters doesn't offer any reasons for vampiric behavior — he
simply offers it as a physiological possibility. We find it to be quite interesting indeed!
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