List of birds by flight speed
This is a list of the fastest flying birds in the world. A bird's velocity is necessarily variable; a hunting bird will reach much greater speeds while diving to catch prey than when gliding. The bird with the greatest airspeed velocity is the Peregrine falcon, able to exceed 321.8 km/h (200 mph) in its hunting dives. The greatest self-powered horizontal speed is achieved by Homing Racing Pigeons. They can fly 1100 km (700 miles) in a single day, and they have been recorded flying at 177 km/h (110 miles per hour), making them the birds with the fastest speed ever recorded on a self-powered flight, and the fastest endurance flight.
Douglas A. Lawson
When the discovery of the fossils was reported in 1975, "Quetzalcoatlus" was the largest flying creature known to have lived. A fellow researcher challenged Lawson's estimates of the dimensions of the wing architecture of "Quetzalcoatlus". However, Lawson responded by demonstrating that while inconsistent with those of modern-day birds, his estimates were consistent with extrapolations of other pterosaurs, such as "Pterodactylus antiquus". In 2010 the U.S. National Park Service described "Quetzalcoatlus" as the world's second-largest known flying creature.