Wired.com has a story about pterosaurs.  Want to know what an animal eats… look at its teeth!  That’s exactly what a paper published in Nature Communications did.  The researcher imaged teeth of pterosaurs using a method called infinite focus microscopy.  This allowed them to compare the teeth with modern animals, whose diets we know.

THE PTEROSAURS HAD no way of knowing it, but they would one day become a bit of a headache for scientists. The flying reptiles lived alongside the dinosaurs between 210 million and 66 million years ago, ranging from the size of a sparrow to the height of a damn giraffe in the case of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, whose wings stretched 33 feet.

If they flew like birds but were in fact reptiles, which group did they take after when it comes to diet? Paleobiologists often look to living animals for clues: A Komodo dragon, for instance, packs serrated teeth for slashing through flesh, whereas crocodilians use their peg teeth to grasp prey and swallow it whole. So even though the pterosaurs are long gone, today scientists can analyze the shapes of their skulls and teeth to suggest whether a certain species was likely to hunt insects, fish, or the flesh of terrestrial animals.

Now, one group of researchers has a newfangled tool for divining not only what a pterosaur ate, but how that prey, in a sense, bit back. It turns out that chewing on different materials creates characteristic patterns of “microwear” on the tooth, on the scale of millionths of a meter. (The same thing also happens to your teeth, and to modern reptiles like crocodiles and monitor lizards.) These patterns offer clues to an animal’s eating habits.