A pair of fossilized baby pterosaurs, nicknamed Lucky I and Lucky II, are telling paleontologists all about what the weather was like 150 million years ago, and it was nasty.

Their multi-epoch-spanning chit chat about the weather begins in what is now southern Germany, in a fossil goldmine known as the Solnhofen Limestone, a prehistoric lagoon turned limestone quarry famous for preserving everything from early birds to tiny flying reptiles in incredible detail.

As reported by Science News, researchers recently gave Lucky I and Lucky II the fossil equivalent of an autopsy and found something unsettling: both had fractured humerus bones, the upper “arm” of their wings. They were broken at clean, oblique angles. These weren’t post-death breaks from pressure or scavengers; they looked like injuries from something sudden and violent, something few creatures could walk away from alive.

The leading theory is that a violent tropical storm snatched the hatchlings mid-flight and tore their wings with brutal force, twisting and mangling them before dropping the little pterosaurs into a shallow muddy lagoon like nature’s most unfortunate plaything. The babies drowned, but their remains were preserved almost instantly in the fine sediment, fossilized before time or nature could rip them apart any further.

The baby pterosaurs’ brutal demise, at least, finally explains why the Solnhofen site contains so many flawless baby pterosaur fossils but mostly disarticulated scraps of adults. You’d think the delicate skeletons of hatchlings would vanish first, not last. But if storms selectively snuffed out and buried the babies whole, while older, stronger individuals were battered post-mortem in rougher waters, then the fossil record we’ve been looking at may be biased.

Catastrophic events like storms may have had an outsized say in what gets preserved and what gets erased in the fossil record. Some of what we know about prehistoric life, like what lived where, how many there were, and how they died, might be the result of a single, violent weather event that skewed the entire picture.

Lucky I and Lucky II met an unfortunate and brutally violent end. But thanks to them, millions upon millions of years later, their well-preserved fossils helped us figure out why those fossils were so well preserved.