Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur#Origins

We don't know how pterosaurs evolved powered flight. The most primitive, probable, ancestor of pterosaurs had a bodyplan closer to that of a kangaroo. And the earliest pterosaurs like Preondactylus or Eudimorphodon were already fully capable of flight.

Aliens, obviously

Pfft - they’re all over the place!

Why wouldn't it be gliding -> flapping -> liftoff?

No evidence if the intermediate species. It makes sense, but without evidence, it's just conjecture.

Sometimes it's easy to forget just how rare fossilization is.

It requires that the species live in a climate with pretty specific conditions, to die under a few very specific circumstances, at a particular convergence of atypical events. The dino bones we have represent a tiny little fraction of the species that lived.

And with gaps in fossil record that last for millions of years, who knows whether we will ever figure out the pathway to flight.

I have a couple of fossils round the house and it's so incredible to behold a creature that lived millions of years ago.

Plus fossils can form, emerge, and erode away before humans even evolved, thus removing our chances of knowing about species that DID have a chance to fossilize, all because bad luck said the geology between now and then would fuck our knowledge over.

No reason it wouldn't be. Ground up vs tree down is more about if controlling a jump or a fall comes before the gliding.

Personally I see the researchers who place bat locomotion as most analogous to how pterosaurs would've moved, and then further reason that our evidence points more towards bats being tree down (but we're STILL not sure on that one because everything that flys evolves too fuckin fast) and that would also mean pterosaurs are PROBABLY also a tree down evolutionary path.

Of course, I'm not a scientist with any sort of official opinions, but I also feel like your babies surviving a fall from a canopy by gliding would have more evolutionary weight and result in the super fast adaptation towards flight than controlling jumps.

When I read "powered flight" I imagine them with little outboard motors and propellers