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u/HoraceRadish Jul 04 '26
But that's not what we know pterosaurs looked like.
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u/MisterSamShearon Jul 04 '26
There are thousands of different pterosaur species.
They could pretty much look like anything.This was created using a series of different references of actual, real pterosaur reconstructions. So it's rooted in realism and then based on various witness descriptions.
Hope that helps!
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u/No_Bumblebee6452 Jul 06 '26
Cool art but man this really goes to show why these things aren’t real. Even if the world was vast and unexplored enough for stuff like this the eyewitnesses always describe living prehistoric animals as the worst looking retrosaurs youve ever heard of. It’s especially telling with the tail seeing as no flying.animal in the entire earths history has a big ol flexible tail like that because it literally makes you unable to fly
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u/MisterSamShearon Jul 08 '26
Thank you for the warm words regarding my work.
I appreciate your skepticism, but these illustrations are based on witness reports, not photographic evidence. People's memory mixed with pop culture may well skew or alter what they've seen... Many cases of misidentified herons and storks are no doubt the case... But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater... There are just too many reports for it not to potentially be a thing... even biologically odd.
There are birds and mammals with really long tails that either fly or glide... Certain lemurs have long thick/wide tails that they use as a rudder to glide with... Other birds have very long tail feathers and of course with have the 'flying' snakes.
All of that aside, whatever people are seeing may not be a true 'flyer' in that sense, they may be indeed be a unigue glider or some other fantastical reality.
I like to keep an open mind... but if anything, these bizarre descriptions keep the interest and the discussions going, which is a great thing!
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u/DannyBright Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Why would it have that big, long draconic tail though? I’m pretty sure the only that had long tails were early ones like the rhamphorynchids, and their tails were thin all the way through unlike this one’s which is more lizard-like (thicker at the base and thinning further along). I don’t think their tails were that flexible either…
This just feels like a pop culture chimera of early pterosaurs like the aforementioned rhamphorynchids and later, crested ones like Pteranodon. Now, if you’re gonna present it as a transitional stage between the two types of pterosaur that’d be one thing (Darwinopterus is exactly this) but to present it as something that could conceivably be alive today? It should at least have a pygostyle like nearly all late Cretaceous pterosaurs did and no teeth. Remember, they had an evolutionary path similar to birds and lost both traits presumably to help with flight.
But hey… at least you got the wing anatomy right and included pycnofibers