A Minor Issue of Palaeontological Pedantry
The gorgeous preserved skull of Ludodactylus.
Zhiheng Li, Zhonghe Zhou, Julia A. Clarke (CC BY 4.0)
Ludodactylus sibbicki is a discovered in 2003 from the ~112 million year-old Crato Formation in Brazil1. It's known from a single undistorted, nearly-complete skull. Now you may be thinking that a single incomplete skull is hardly enough to declare the existence of an entire species of prehistoric animal off of, but it turns out that we can get quite a bit of information from much less than that!
Looking at the Ludodactylus specimen, the first thing you'll probably notice is that thing preserved in the pterosaur's lower jaw. It's a large, sharp-sided leaf, and on close inspection it's actually going between the sides of the jaw1, inside the throat. It'd be a pretty crazy coincidence if Ludodactylus died and a leaf just happened to drift into its mouth, so we're pretty sure that this unfortunate incident happened while the animal was alive.
There's another big clue to this prehistoric cold case—the part of the leaf inside the mouth is pretty much intact, but the part outside is badly frayed. It'd be hard for that much fraying to happen after Ludodactylus died and decayed without also disloging the leaf from its jaws, so we can infer that this also occurred while it was still alive.
Yucca rostrata. Not our culprit, but possibly similar in appearance.
Didier Descouens (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The palaeontologists who discovered Ludodactylus think they have an idea of what this ancient animal's final days were like. Ludodactylus was probably fishing in the wetlands of the Crato Formation when it mistook a leaf floating on the water for a fish, which it then tried to swallow—pelicans today frequently make similar mistakes1. The leaf became trapped inside its mouth and the sharp edges pierced its throat. In pain and desperation Ludodactylus attempted to destroy the leaf, possibly by rubbing its jaw on rocks or soil, but only succeeded in fraying the end pierced through its throat. Unable to eat, the pterosaur grew weaker and weaker and eventually died, its body sinking to the bottom of the estuary it called home. The body was devoured by scavengers but the head, which was quickly covered by sediment, was preserved as a fossil for us to discover over 100 million years in the future.
Wikipedia and a number of other sources authoritatively identify the leaf that killed Ludodactylus as that of a yucca plant. This might seem like a plausible ID, as the scientists who discovered Ludodactylus say that the leaf "resembles [those] of recent Cordyline, Yucca or even Agave1."
And herein is where the problem lies. The leaf could not have possibly belonged to any of those plants! Cordylines, yuccas and agaves all belong to the plant family Asparagaceae (the asparagus family), which scientists think appeared some 47 million years ago2, long after Ludodactylus and indeed all pterosaurs went extinct! Plants ancestral to this family were indeed alive at the same time as Ludodactylus, but these would have looked more like onions and irises with strap-like leaves, not throat-piercing ones. Most likely our floral culprit belongs to a lineage just as extinct as Ludodactylus, only superficially resembling the plants living today.
References
1 🔒Frey, E., Martill, D. M., & Buchy, M.-C. (2003). A new crested ornithocheirid from the Lower Cretaceous of northeastern Brazil and the unusual death of an unusual pterosaur. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 217(1), 55-63. https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.SP.2003.217.01.05
2 🔒Janssen, T., & Bremer, K. (2004). The age of major monocot groups inferred from 800+rbcL sequences . Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 146(4), 385–398. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8339.2004.00345.x
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