Writing in The Conversation, Dr Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza (UCL Earth Sciences) explains how climate, ecology and evolutionary science have come together to reveal how pterosaurs learned to fly. Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago , palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of land-bound dinosaurs take to the air and evolve powered flight? The first flying vertebrates seemed to appear on the geological stage fully