  Kepler's short-period exoplanet population has revealed evolutionary features
such as the Radius Valley and the Hot Neptune desert that are likely sculpted
by atmospheric loss over time. These findings suggest that the primordial
planet population is different from the Gyr-old Kepler population, and
motivates exoplanet searches around young stars. Here, we present pterodactyls
, a data reduction pipeline specifically built to address the challenges in
discovering exoplanets around young stars and to work with TESS Primary Mission
30-min cadence photometry, since most young stars were not pre-selected TESS
2-min cadence targets. pterodactyls builds on publicly available and tested
tools in order to extract, detrend, search, and vet transiting young planet
candidates. We search five clusters with known transiting planets:
Tucana-Horologium Association, IC 2602, Upper Centaurus Lupus, Ursa Major and
Pisces Eridani. We show that pterodactyls recovers seven out of the eight
confirmed planets and one out of the two planet candidates, most of which were
initially detected in 2-min cadence data. For these clusters, we conduct
injection-recovery tests to characterize our detection efficiency, and compute
an intrinsic planet occurrence rate of 49+-20% for sub-Neptunes and Neptunes
(1.8-6 Re) within 12.5 days, which is higher than Kepler's Gyr-old occurrence
rates of 6.8+-0.3%. This potentially implies that these planets have shrunk
with time due to atmospheric mass loss. However, a proper assessment of the
occurrence of transiting young planets will require a larger sample unbiased to
planets already detected. As such, pterodactyls will be used in future work to
search and vet for planet candidates in nearby clusters and moving groups.
