Badass Ancient Animals: Nr. 2

By now you may have wondered what actually triggered me to make a list of so many badass prehistoric animals you may have never heard of or didn´t know what exactly makes them so badass. An inspiration for the descriptions were the articles on cracked.com and bogleech.com, but I got the idea itself from (should I dare to already call him "my friend"? Well, "my acquaintance" may sound better) . As you all might know, he can be a little bit, er, offensive from time to time, but he was the one who made me aware of the many awesome facts about prehistoric animals which the public ignores in favour of outdated, but more famous depictions. Without him I probably would have never found out about the successfulness of Crurotarsans during the age of dinosaurs and the great Mark Witton´s work on pterosaurs and omnivorous Ceratopsians. In my list the silver medal goes to an animal you might have already stumbled across in a dinosaur book, but you never were aware of its true badassery till now.
Once again it is a pterosaur, as JohnFaa´s links to Mark Witton´s Flickr account have refined me in terms of pterosaur diversity and special adaptations. While most pterosaurs are very lightly built (as you would expect from a giant flying animal) and have rather weak jaws, one group is the exception that proves the rule - the Dsungaripterids.
Dsungaripterus is a pterosaur you find in a lot of dinosaur books and probably among the few pterosaurs even the general public doesn´t see as stereotypic fish eater skimming through the water. It is usually suggested to feed on snails and shellfish - and one can easily imagine why when looking at its skull. The teeth are broad, flattened, robust and even fused with the jaw bone. Together with its thickened skull bones and enlarged jaw muscles this would have created a powerful bite able to crush snails and shellfish, but also - guess what - bones.
What also makes Dsungaripterus different from other pterosaurs is its unusually heavily built robust skeleton with thick bone walls and shock-absorbing hindlimbs. This all points to a rather terrestrial lifestyle, and you don´t encounter that many crustaceans in a forest. Thus, Dsungaripterus may have been more than a simple shellfish eater - it may have been a winged boar. While their toothless jaw tips are well designed for picking up snails they would also be helpful when probing in the forest undergrowth for food. And with their powerful jaws and heavy built they would be terrifying scavengers and even - shock - predators.
Thus I have drawn a picture of a Dsungaripterus not feeding on shellfish as traditionally depicted, but on a Guanlong, a small ancestor of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex (yeah I know, sweet sweet irony and so on).