A tropical storm was brewing over a chain of islands on the edge of the vast Tethys Ocean - the ancient predecessor to the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea - one day roughly 150 million years ago, and a baby pterosaur was caught in the powerful winds.

The tiny flying reptile hatchling already was capable of flight even at its tender age, but this storm was too much. The wind snapped the humerus, the upper arm bone that helped support its membranous wing, and flung the helpless animal into a lagoon, where it drowned and was covered by churning mud.

Scientists said they found the exact same apparent wind-caused fracture while conducting the equivalent of postmortem examinations on well-preserved fossils of two baby Pterodactylus individuals unearthed years ago in separate locales in the southern German state of Bavaria. The fossils, of slightly different ages, were stored in two museum collections.

"We noticed the injuries completely by chance while we were examining them," said paleontologist Rab Smyth of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers nicknamed the two hatchlings Lucky and Lucky II. It was bad luck for them to have been doomed by storms, but good luck for science that paleontologists have been able to learn from their fossils about the anatomy of young pterosaurs and the drama of life during the Jurassic Period.