London: Male pterodactyls, a class of flying reptiles which
lived alongside dinosaurs between 220 and 65 million years ago,
used their giant head crests to woo the opposite sex, a rare
fossil find has revealed. Scientists who have unearthed a
160-million-year-old fossil, dubbed "Mrs T", believe that while
female pterodactyls had no decorative markings on their heads,
the males sported impressive plumes of feathers, five times the
size of their skull, which they used to show off to prospective
mates. It had previously proved impossible to say whether the
remains of the reptiles, also called pterosaurs, were male or
female, and "sexing" them has foxed experts for more than 100
years. The evidence comes from Mrs T, the nickname given to a
female reptile preserved together with the egg she was about to
lay. The creature, whose skeletal remains were uncovered from
Liaoning Province in north-east China, belonged to the group of
darwinopterus pterosaurs. It had relatively large hips to
accommodate the passage of egg