Overview

• University of Leicester researchers report in Current Biology that two Pterodactylus hatchlings, nicknamed Lucky I and Lucky II, each exhibit a clean, oblique humerus fracture revealed under ultraviolet light.
• The team interprets the matching breaks as perimortem injuries from powerful gusts that twisted the wings in flight, incapacitating the juveniles over a lagoon in what is now southern Germany.
• The authors conclude the hatchlings drowned and quickly sank before being rapidly buried by very fine, lime‑rich muds, producing rare complete and articulated preservation.
• With wingspans under 20 cm and skeletons virtually unchanged since death, the specimens help explain why Solnhofen yields many intact juveniles but mostly fragmentary adults.
• The study proposes that storms selectively buried small, young pterosaurs, whereas larger individuals likely floated and disarticulated before sinking, reframing the site’s juvenile dominance as a taphonomic bias (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.006).