Posted on April 11, 2020 | Comments Off on Useful relevant science: the bats behind the Covid-19 pandemic
This bit of mammalian science is worth a read, from biologist Matt Ridley’s blog, first published in the Wall Street Journal. And yes, a very few bat species do live above the Arctic Circle in North America and Eurasia but their distributions only overlap with polar bears in the most southern areas of the bear’s range (and none of the bats are the horseshoe variety that carry coronaviruses): along the coasts of southern Labrador and Hudson Bay, the north coast of Newfoundland, and in NW Alaska along the Bering Sea.
The Bats Behind the Pandemic (published 9 April 2020): From Ebola to Covid-19, many of the deadliest viruses to emerge in recent years have the same animal source.
“RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.
The scientists were mostly sampling a very similar species with slightly shorter wings, called Rhinolophus sinicus, in a successful search for the origin of the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. That search had alarming implications, which were largely ignored.
In Shitou Cave, south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, they found viruses in the bats’ droppings and anal swabs that were more similar to human SARS than anything found in palm civets, the small mammals that until then were presumed to be the source of human infection. Back in the laboratory, they found that one of the viruses from bat droppings, called WIV1, could thrive in monkey and human cells specially engineered to activate the gene for ACE2 receptors, the lock to which a coronavirus’s spike protein can fit as a key. This suggested that people could catch SARS directly from a bat dropping.
Then in 2016, Ralph Baric and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that the same bat virus could infect live mice that had been engineered to express the human gene for the ACE2 receptor. The virus was “poised for human emergence,” as the title of Dr. Baric’s paper put it.
When Covid-19 broke out, attention focused on pangolins, mammals often called scaly anteaters. Early analyses of the pangolin version of the virus seemed to indicate it was even more closely related to the human version than the RaTG13 bat sample was. The illegal pangolin trade for traditional Chinese medicine brings people into contact with sick animals. Just over a year ago, 21 live Malayan pangolins destined for sale in China were intercepted by anti-smuggling officers in Guangdong. Despite the best efforts of a local wildlife rescue center, 16 died with swollen, flooded lungs, rich in coronaviruses.
The role of pangolins in the spread of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, remains unclear. A closer look at more of the Sars-CoV-2 genome, published last week by Maciej Boni at Penn State University and David Robertson at Glasgow University, together with Chinese and European colleagues, finds that human versions of the virus are more closely related to the RaTG13 horseshoe bat sample from the cave than they are to the known pangolin versions. It is not yet possible to tell whether the virus went from bat to pangolin to people, or from bat to pangolin and bat to people in parallel.
…
Bats are sold in markets and supplied directly to restaurants throughout China and southeast Asia, but no direct evidence of their sale in Wuhan’s wet market has come to light. Also, horseshoe bats, which are much smaller than the tastier fruit bats, are generally not among the species eaten. The significance of the Yunnan cave sample is that it shows the bat virus didn’t need to recombine with viruses in other species in a market to be infectious to people. [my bold] The role of the wet markets may be that other animals get infected there and produce much higher loads of virus than the bats would, amplifying the infection.
All over Asia and Africa human beings encounter horseshoe bats, any one of which could be carrying a virus that could start an epidemic if amplified in a market or similar setting. Bats have supplied most of the dangerous new diseases of the past two decades. The natural reservoir of rabies is in bats, especially in the Americas. Ebola, Marburg and other highly dangerous viruses come from bats, mainly in Africa. The Hendra and Nipah viruses are caught from fruit bats and have caused lethal but small outbreaks in south Asia and Australia. And most coronaviruses seem to originate in bats, including SARS and MERS, a frequently fatal illness that people in the Middle East began catching from camels in 2012, the camels having picked it up from bats.
There are good reasons why bats spread so many viruses. Bats are long-lived mammals, like us, and live in large crowds, like us—ideal for spreading respiratory infections in particular. One bat roost in Texas houses 20 million bats at certain times of year, a concentration of mammals paralleled only by people in cities. There are lots of different species—one-quarter of all mammal species are bats—so they have lots of different viruses. And they fly, carrying diseases long distances, allowing viruses to indulge in “host-shifting” between bat species. This especially suits viruses that can “recombine” with related strains, like coronaviruses.
It is not yet clear why horseshoe bats, in particular, are so infested with coronaviruses. These are average-size bats, distinguished by large, pointed ears and weird little sonar dishes known as nose-leafs, the outer part of which are often shaped like horseshoes. There are at least 100 species, many of which look very alike. Absent from the Americas, they are found all over the tropics of the Old World and in some warm temperate regions. They seem to be fond of living in caves and gathering in large aggregations.
In a paper published in February last year, Patrick Woo and colleagues at Hong Kong University surveyed the coronaviruses found in bats and came to a prescient conclusion: “Bat–animal and bat–human interactions, such as the presence of live bats in wildlife wet markets and restaurants in Southern China, are important for interspecies transmission of [coronaviruses] and may lead to devastating global outbreaks.”
Read the whole thing here.
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And it is that everyone thus far has had the luck, strength, and gall to survive this long!
You all are the lucky ones.
You all are so far, the lucky ones. And that is how nature makes it, for we humans are a part of nature and not apart from nature.
Watch this documentary. It is very compelling:
https://www.facebook.com/WayneDupreeShow/videos/565333511002518/?hc_location=ufi
In what way? Certainly, everyone should know that China is dishonest and their response allowed the virus to spread.
Some say that their keeping the Wuhan airport open to international flights while closing domestic flights and trains indicates they wanted to spread the virus internationally. I would like to know their rationale for that.
Easy to infer a rationale: Their economy was shutting down. The world is a highly competitive place.
If everyone has this problem, the playing field is leveled.
As sickening as it is, from a geopolitical perspective, it may be unreasonable to suppose that a leadership focused more on competitive than humanitarian concerns, would of course make sure the virus went everywhere.
Could be as much as a no brainer as countries wanting nuclear technology after WWII.
Of course, it may not have mattered at all. It is entirely possible, likely perhaps, that by the time anyone really knew the nature of what had happened when this virus entered people and began to spread, it was already too late to contain it. Especially given the apparent abysmal state of readiness to react quickly and effectively of the majority of the world.
Worth read:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mittellaendische.ch%2F2020%2F04%2F07%2Fcovid-19-eine-zwischenbilanz-oder-eine-analyse-der-moral-der-medizinischen-fakten-sowie-der-aktuellen-und-zuk%25C3%25BCnftigen-politischen-entscheidungen%2F
It may relativate the look on China, beside other interesting iniformations
Compelling to me because it explains how the CCP Virus is almost certainly genetically engineered and whether by design or incompetence escaped from the Level 4 facility in Wuhan.
A quick update. The only country with quasi reliable data is South Korea. The reason is that it is unlikely there is a large pool of recovered/undetected thanks to their very rapid and very thorough contact tracing screening. Mean incubation 5 days, mean symptom to recovery ~10 days just doesn’t permit lots of ‘missed’ recoveries when contact tracing is less than two weeks.
To 4/11 (yesterday per Statista), there had been 510479 tested, 14070 no result yet, 485924 negative, 10480 positive and quarantined. Of those, 20% remained asymptomatic after 14 days. So the attack rate with quarantine is 2.2%. It will be higher elsewhere with no contact tracing and only social distancing, but we won’t know until antibody testing is widespread. But Korea suggests herd immunity will take quite a while to develop. Was 2 years for the 1918 flu event.
Active Korea cases 3026. Previously developed model based on NYC and NOLA, with one ICU mod to account for BoJo (developed using average for MI, NY, NJ) 3026*0.26 ICU*0.9 ventilator*0.5 deaths ~ 354 future deaths on top of 211 already (the initial church cult cluster was almost all under 40 so past deaths low and recoveries 7243 high) is 565/10480 CFR ~ 5.4%. Real bad. Half of SARS, with a much more infective virus.
So I am less sanguine about about the future course of this pandemic.
The S. Korean titre for the was likely higher thus offsetting their ages. So, I’m more optimistic.
Just a word on the general idea of immunity to a novel human virus, and herd immunity…
It seems entirely possible that this virus will now be endemic within humans, even if a vaccine is found and effective antiviral treatments are identified (which seems likely given how quickly one and possibly several treatments with some large degree of efficacy have been found) and approved for widespread usage.
We really just do not have any experience, AFAIK, of what will become of a new virus that becomes introduced into people and then widely dispersed, during the period of time that we have been able to track such things.
Just one look at one virus and how it is thought to have spilled over from one species to another in a sequential fashion, and then become endemic in people and has radiated out from what was one virus into many, can give some insight into what could possibly happen (Keeping in mind that the following may be well understood to be highly supported and factual, or may only be speculative in nature and not as well understood as has been asserted).
First some background info:
Some models of viral evolution places the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of all coronaviruses in all species everywhere in the world as recently as only 8000 BCE (Before Common Era, roughly the same as BC, or about 10 thousand years ago…IOW since the start of the current interglacial era), although other models estimate corona viruses have existed and co-evolved for some 55 millions of years or more:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676139/
It is thought that the origin of the human corona virus clade known as OC-43, one of the causes of the common cold, is thought to have spilled over into human from a zoonotic event involving bovine corona virus.
This same bovine corona virus is thought to have spilled over into horses in or around the year 1790.
The cross-over event into humans for OC-43 is thought to have occurred in or around the year 1890, and may have been the cause of a pandemic in that year which was assumed to have been a flu pandemic, but the actual infectious organism is in fact now known. Since models of viral evolution places the divergence of OC-43 at that time, some researchers have made the inferential speculation that these events were one and the same.
Since that time, this OC-43 virus is thought to have diverged, using the same models of viral evolution, in the 1950’s, into the present diverse clade of viruses that cause mild infection (most commonly it is mild) in people and are in constant worldwide circulation.
Now, not being virologists, many of us may have assumed, that the viruses that cause the common cold have always been a part of the group of viruses that are endemic in people, that a virus group which exists all over the world in so many species as all of the corona viruses have always existed within this species, and so forth. And this may yet prove to be true. But models of viral evolution based on known rates of mutation and divergence tell a different tale.
In this view, it begins to become clear that as humans have prospered and spread out and multiplied, and taken various animals, domesticated them, and brought them with us as we spread and multiplied, we have caused a spreading and a diversification of viruses to follow right along with us and our human and animal companion groups.
I would point out though that research into various viruses has led me to wonder just how accurate, well established, and even how well justified models of viral evolution really are
At this point in time, rabies is endemic in a multitude of wild animals all over the world, including North and South America.
Viral evolution models suggest that all rabies viruses have a common ancestor as recently as 1500 years ago.
But rabies as a disease seems to be one of the oldest known infectious diseases, with far older historical documentation than this timeline would seem to imply.
There are accounts of the known danger of dogs bites and a disease which sounds like rabies from as long ago as 2300 BCE.
Some studies of rabies in bats have placed a genetic recombination event and cross over to mammals in the family carnivora, perhaps skunks or raccoons, as sometime around 200 years ago.
Only bats in the new world are known to carry rabies, while more generally, bats and carnivora species harbor reservoirs of the virus.
Other studies have asserted that all rabies in the Americas is a result of rabies being introduced from Europe around that time, sometime in the late 1700’s. I had thought this was a more or less established fact.
Genotype 1 has been thought to have evolved in Europe in the 1600’s and spread to the rest of the word from there as a result of human exploration and colonization.
But other studies have asserted that bats in the Americas can be shown to have existed as long ago as the 13th century, although the range of uncertainty seems to allow that it could have been a few hundred years before or after that.
ranton/
One way to interpret all of this uncertainty is that far too much weight has be given to individual studies over the years, and that such information has been incorporated into reference books and texts without proper respect for the uncertain or tentative nature of any particular finding in any area of science.
I think we have all noticed such a tendency, which seems to me to have become worse in more recent years than was previously the case, for some new study to be accorded the status of “fact”, and said by authors to be “known”.
I for one have certainly noted such a tendency in the world of so-called climate science, which seem to have all by itself resulted in the abandonment of proper utilization of the scientific method, which dictates that no result is given much weight unless and until it has been shown to be both verifiable and repeatable. Peer review seems to have evolved in the minds of many individuals into some sort of verification of a finding as being of a factual and authoritative nature, when in fact many findings are highly speculative, opinion based, mistaken, or otherwise erroneous. IOW nothing like a fact at all.
Barely more than an opinion.
In fact the entire discipline of CAGW seems to require as a matter of course that everyone everywhere swallow entire narratives, and to even question them, let alone actively dispute them, is more than grounds enough to any particular person to be not just discounted and ignored, but ridiculed and marginalized, and excluded from the world of publication.
It has also led to a watering down of standards when it comes to conferring advanced degrees and positions of responsibility and esteem in academia, which over time has led to a general lessening of standards of scientific rigor across and ever widening array of disciplines.
* My apologies for straying off the original topic on such a tangent, but so much of what is going on in the world these days seems to overlap with the obsessions of the warmista cult.
Everything is politicized.
Research funding has been sucked dry from other areas of endeavor.
Academics standards have been diluted and lowered.
We cannot even have a pandemic, or a close look at an issue in virology, without running right into the shadow of warmista jackassery.
rantoff/
Typo:
“…is in fact now known…”
Should be,
“…is in fact not known…”
And a word was omitted from this sentence”
“But other studies have asserted that bats in the Americas can be shown to have existed as long ago as the 13th century, although the range of uncertainty seems to allow that it could have been a few hundred years before or after that.”
I meant to write,
“But other studies have asserted that *rabies virus in* bats in the Americas can be shown to have existed as long ago as the 13th century, although the range of uncertainty seems to allow that it could have been a few hundred years before or after that.
Sorry.
The article appears to assert that horseshoe bats are THE source of coronaviruses.
This is completely false.
In one survey of one country which included a diverse sampling of bats, many species of bats were found to host a wide diversity of coronaviruses.
And this was just one random study in one random place that sampled bats at random.
The researchers basically decided to just go out and find some bats and look for viruses, particularly coronaviruses.
In fact int seems likely given the overlap in the range of bats and the frequency of zoonotic events, that all bats everywhere harbor coronaviruses.
Bats in particular seem to be able to exist with many viruses living within them and not causing any particular disease.
The way they live, in dense colonies, wide fields of daily travel, and with long periods of hibernation, torpor, and sleep (bats are only active at night, which means that many bats must necessarily spend the majority of every 24 hour period in their gathering places, crowded together, during at least part of a year, particularly in higher latitudes, with the exception of bats living right on the equator which presumably means that they might theoretically spend only 12 hours nesting/roosting/hanging around), they spread viruses easily.
And they have several distinctions with other mammals in their immunology, such as a absent or weak STING response (stimulator of interferon genes), a relative dearth of inflammasomes, etc.
In short, it is a mistake to suppose that a limited number of bats have corona viruses, or even that there is anything like a comprehensive base of knowledge of what animals have what viruses.
Again, a single research survey can easily find dozens to hundreds of new virus species in any particular random location one might choose to look.
Broadly speaking, what we do know about bats or any other animal, and what viruses and other diseases they carry or host, is known by logical inference to be a tiny fraction of what is out there.
Given that every place anyone looks, new viruses are found, there is not even any way to estimate what proportion remains undiscovered.
Source for the above assertion re bat virus research survey:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4416284/
Our history of being hunter gatherer for 200,000 years suggests that we have a long history of interacting with all living animals on this planet on a intimate basis.
Bats in remote areas less so, than other animals. They are not easy to trap or catch using primitive methods, and are active at night when we are not.
So it is not surprising that they would have viruses that are foreign to our immune systems, while nearly all other animals we have a long history of catching and eating.
From what I have read from many sources, there is a large amount of effort going into studying bats and the viruses they harbor in recent years, and that this is not necessarily proportional to the number of viruses that might threaten people, or what animals have lots of viruses.
Although it certainly does seem that we have been treated to numerous events in recent years in which bats have been the probable and proximate host for significant infectious diseases that have emerged into humans.
And it does also appear to be the case that bats are able to carry around a lot of viruses without being particularly harmed by them, perhaps because of their immune system peculiarities and differences with that carried by many other sorts of mammals, in particular people.
This very interesting article mentions bats that congregate in Texas. I remember being in Austin one summer, in August, when a lot of bats come to congregate underneath the Congress Street bridge downtown. Native Austinites told me that those bats feed primarily on mosquitoes during the course of their visit to Austin. That became apparent to me when, on the particular day in August which was hot and humid, I was walking on a riverwalk along the Colorado River and noticed nary a mosquito in sight. Very untypical, but welcome. Since that time I have acquired a great respect for the Texas bats and hope they continue to gorge on the Texas mosquito population.
The article also gives new meaning to the term “bat s. . t crazy,” doesn’t it? Lol.
A famous spectacle in Austin, when the innumerable bats emerge near sundown.
Imagine the scourges of mosquito-borne diseases without bats to control the vectors.
What we don’ tappear to know is where the virus in bats originated,or was acquired ,was it from their eating habits ?insects?or are they ‘naturally present ‘in bats .As several viral diseases eg dengue , yellow fever, are spread to humans by mosquitos , which spend part of their life cycle in water,
could they be be the source ?
Good question.
Working out the evolutionary history of viruses is hard, especially for RNA viruses, which mutate and recombine so readily.
Studying relationships among viruses in different bat species suggests that they’ve been in bats a very long time. Whether bat viruses descend from those infecting their protobat ancestors or not can’t be well established. Some studies find that coronaviruses themselves arose fairly recently (~10,000 years ago). Others that they, like bats, date from the Eocene Epoch.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676139/
A Case for the Ancient Origin of Coronaviruses
Lacking virus fossils, who can say? Molecular clock studies for such rapidly evolving and recombining nucleic acid containing entities necessarily have wide error bars.
I would have been much more surprised had the corona virus family not be greatly represented in certain bat species then the other way around. If the corona viruses were killing the bats, they have less an opportunity to spread, mutate, and make new strains of virus. If they can live pseudo-comfortably in the bat host, then there is a lot of time for them to reproduce into new strains, so you get a lot of strains of corona virus in the host.
Had the bats not had many strains of corona virus, I would be looking for yet another animal as the true source.
Bats have a very strong immune system, so if the virus evolves in a bat, it too has to be very strong in that it reproduce quickly and spread quickly – not good when it enters a human host. The best thing we (humans) can do is learn to leave bats the heck alone. If we do not come into contact with them, they cannot directly spread the virus to us – they might still be able to deliver it through a second host but that is much less likely.
It will be interesting to see if the SARS-CovID-2 virus permanently survives in human hosts. If it does, we are likely to see two things in the future – more strains of corona mutated from the first that cause pandemics and less deadly strains of the virus. A virus’s success after all is measured in reproduction success, not in the deaths it causes. Death is actually not a successful “strategy” for a virus.
“Bats have a very strong immune system,”
“The best thing we (humans) can do is learn to leave bats the heck alone”
Or make bat-humans GMO mutants.
https://www.sciencealert.com/deadly-viruses-always-seem-to-start-off-with-bats-here-s-why-they-re-patient-zero
“Bats have a very strong immune system”
Bats have been living densely in big roosts for about 50 million years, humans only for a few thousand years. Evolution takes time.
“A virus’s success after all is measured in reproduction success, not in the deaths it causes. Death is actually not a successful “strategy” for a virus.”
Unfortunately this does not apply in this particular case since those killed are mostly past reproductive age.
And their death means that their money won’t be spent in day to day care for them when they are too old, and can be inherited, making their genes MORE likely to succeed.
Bats in Australia, which are protected, carry a virus similar to rabies. They hang in trees in vast numbers, they can bite if you are unlucky, but mostly urinating and defecating constantly. Don’t walk under a tree full of bats in Australia.
No mention of bat guano mining by farmers. Farmers then taking their products to markets.
I told a group of international students a Coronavirus Joke. They all got it eventually but the chinese student got it right off the bat
Not really relevant to anything, but: bats can pack extremely tight together on the roost…. think baby rats so close they can entwine their tails.
Put a really high porch on a house I owned in Houston. Two support columns, 8×8 treated pine faced with Hardie siding, about 18′ tall.
Six months later, I’m looking out the back door around daybreak and see bats flittering in and ducking into very small openings that were left at the top of each column between the core post and the facing. Over the next 10 days, I did a rough count and concluding there were over 20 bats homesteading one column and almost as many in the other, when you wouldn’t have expected there to be room for even a single bat in either.
Didn’t gas them, instead looked on the internet and found instructions for building ‘bat excluder’ devices. Simple explanation of that is: they can leave home but they can’t come back. No prodigal sons, in other words.
Point of this is: whatever one of the little bastards might be sick with, they all are likely to have it. Kind of like high density urban areas, the ones that we’ve been told we’ll happy living in once we’ve moved past the hydrocarbon age.
If you lived in Brazil, it would be against the law to block out those bats. They eat mosquitoes, who may carry Malaria.
It was Bats ??? & I silly thought all this time, that it was the Green Monkey ??
Thanks for correcting me …
It’s a difficult feat for mammals to fly. We mammals have “tidal” lungs where oxygen rich air goes in and oxygen depleted air goes out by the same bronchial route, getting mixed up in the process. By the time inspired air reaches the alveoli where gas exchange occurs, its oxygen concentration is ten times less than that of atmospheric air. A bad design feature.
How else could a lung be designed? – you might ask. Well, take a look at birds. (And other dinosaurs.) In the avian (bird) lung the air transport is unidirectional, not tidal, with the crucially important consequence that air arrives at the alveoli with the full undiminished atmospheric concentration of oxygen (20% or so).
OK so how is this achieved? Do they only breathe in all their lives, with their lungs getting bigger and bigger till they die? No. That would be poor design. Instead the bodies of birds and other dinosaurs are permeated with a system of air sacs. They even fill some inner bone cavities, conferring the additional advantage of lightness. In-breathed air goes not to the lungs directly but instead it goes first to all the distributed air sacs. From those air sacs the air (still fully oxygenated) goes into the lungs, and via the lungs out of the body. A round trip in which the flow of air is unidirectional and oxygen reaches the alveoli with undiminished atmospheric concentration of oxygen.
Therefore the efficiency of the avian lung is ten times higher than that of the tidal mammalian lung (and also the hepatic pump tidal lung of crocodiles). Both Saurischian and Ornithischian dinosaurs also had this avian type lung.
There are enormous implications of this massively more efficient avian lung. The bird lung can be much smaller and still achieve the needed gas exchange for prolonged energetic flying. The lung does not need to expand and contract nearly as much. You don’t see a bird’s body expanding and contracting with breathing. In fact, it can’t – a bird’s rib cage can and does extend from the thorax all the way to the pelvic region. No need for a six-pack on a seagull. No need for a soft unprotected abdominal region to allow panting. There is only a small posterior membrane at the birds rear end where breathing related expansion and contraction takes place, but it’s small and hard to notice.
That’s why a bird can take to the air in Scotland and land in Africa. Or remain aerobatically airborne for days on end like swallows or swifts. Mammals are incapable of anything remotely approaching this metabolic feat.
What has any of this to do with coronavirus? There is the bat connection. Bats are mammals that do successfully fly, although not as far or fast as birds. The majority of a bat’s body is filled by a big pair of tidal lungs that compensate for their inefficiency by just working very hard. Now due to the extreme metabolic-energetic demands of flying with the wrong kind of lung, bats’ general metabolic rate is very high. This high metabolic rate of all a bat’s tissues has an important implication regarding viruses. The faster metabolising bat cells and tissues are able to tolerate a higher viral load than their more sluggish land-bound fellow mammals. This is why bats carry round so many viruses. Viruses like bats as hosts because more of them can cosy up together in the animal and they fly all over the place giving opportunities for travel and socialising. And also if jumping to other species if it’s really their lucky day.
So it’s the high metabolic rate of bats necessitated by their flying that accounts for their high viral load and their role in communicating viruses.
The Chixilub meteor has a lot to answer for.
Sauropods probably couldn’t have grown so gigantic if their bones didn’t have avian-style air sacs.
The jury is still out as to whether pterosaurs had more dino-like or croc-like lungs. But the dinosauromorph ancestors of both saurischians and ornithischians appear to have bird-style lungs. As fellow ornithodires, pterosaurs are more closely related to dinosaurs than to crocs, within the archosaur clade. That pterosuars could fly so well suggests that they too might have had birdlike lungs.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180983
Vertebral morphometrics and lung structure in non-avian dinosaurs
“Whether the more extreme partitioning of the respiratory system implied here in basal dinosauriforms represents an ancestral condition for Ornithodira, or maybe even for Archosauria, remains unclear. Pterosaurs, the ornithodiran outgroup to dinosauriforms, have been reconstructed as having an avian-style respiratory system based on the presence of unambiguous PSP and inferred air sacs [59,60]. Their costovertebral morphology has been described as ‘crocodilian-like’, as the parapophysis migrates dorsally to lie on or at the base of the transverse process, and it has been suggested that pterosaurs therefore had more compliant, more homogeneous lungs [61]. However, the parapophysis also migrates dorsally towards the transverse process in many dinosaurian taxa, and our results showed greater similarity between dinosaurs and birds rather than dinosaurs and crocodilians. Further quantitative studies focusing on pterosaurs are clearly needed.”
John
It would make sense that the pterosaurs also had the efficient avian lung.
If they could find some vertebrae with ribs attached ventrally, the morphology of that connection would help confirm an avian respiratory anatomy.
The anatomical evidence is mixed, as per the link.
But I agree both phylogeny and lifestyle suggest an avian-style repiratory system.
“…although not as far or fast as birds.”
Perhaps not, although I believe there is no general consensus on this.
Bats are widely recognized as being far more maneuverable than birds, however.
Yes, bats are more maneuverable, but don’t fly as far or as fast.