Wings over North Carolina

Rounding out Paleontology Week is a story courtesy of my friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, the brilliant novelist Tyler Tork (whose new book The Deep End is a must-read for anyone who likes speculative fiction and magical realism).  And, I might add, it is completely on-brand for 2020.

So today we have: pterodactyl sightings are on the increase in the United States.

Pteranodon by Heinrich Harder (1916)  {Image is in the Public Domain]

Myself, I would have thought that one pterodactyl sighting would be an increase given that the number of currently-living pterodactyls is zero, but apparently I'm incorrect.  Evidently North Carolina is a hotspot of pterodactyl activity, where people are seeing big flying things with crests and a diamond-shaped rudder on the tail.  This sounds to me like my favorite pterodactyloid, Rhamphorhynchus:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Now, I hasten to add that I don't really believe there are pterodactyls flying around Charlotte.  To me, there's the same problem with this as with all the Bigfoot claims; lots of anecdotal stories of sightings, and not a single unequivocal piece of hard evidence.  You'd think if these things were still around, someone would have run across a body or a skull or something.  Or even a fossil of one that isn't older than 66 million years.

But that doesn't stop the true believers.  Over at the sight LivePterosaurs.com (of course there's a website called "LivePterosaurs.com") you can read dozens of eyewitness accounts.  And much to my surprise, my home state of New York is not far behind North Carolina, according to this map:

So I think I better keep my eyes open.  Although even with my fairly lousy eyesight, it's hard to imagine how I could miss something that (according to one witness) "had an enormous pointed beak, and a pointed top of its head...  The wingspan was probably about 5-6 feet wide with bony wing structure ending in points (almost like sails) and what looked like small claws on the middle of wing."

Anyhow, after reading this article I made the mistake of looking at the "comments" section.  (This is, in fact, always a mistake.)  The comments seemed to be half "of course pterodactyls are still alive, I've seen one" and half "whatever you've been smoking, can I have some?"  But my favorite comment was from the woman who wrote (spelling and grammar are as written): "Wit all the ice melting.  Who knows what was frozen.  Or.  Wilderness caves where anything could hide."

So here we have yet another downside of global climate change; thawing out all the pterodactyls who have been encased in ice in the frozen wasteland of North Carolina for 66 million years.

In any case, if you had "pterodactyls" on your 2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card, you can check that box off.  And frankly, I'd take pterodactyls over murder hornets.  Have you ever seen a photograph of one of those things?  They are huge, and have a stinger like a fucking harpoon.  So I say: bring on the pterodactyls.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The hills are shadows

One of the reasons I became a speculative fiction novelist is because I love to think about how the world would be if the rules were different.  What if we could pick up from inanimate objects the emotional impressions of the last person who held them?  What if time travel into the past were possible?  What if the force of people's belief caused mythological creatures to come to life?

The difficulty is that this dreaminess about altering the laws of the universe runs headlong into my desire to understand what the actual rules are, and which ultimately led me to dedicate my life to science.  After an unfortunate time in my teenage years when I worked really, really hard to convince myself that all the weird paranormal shit I'd immersed myself in was the truth, I was forced by the modicum of intellectual honesty I had back then to admit that the evidence for all of it was nil, and to give the whole thing up as a bad job.

So I ended up teaching science and critical thinking, and simultaneously writing paranormal fiction.  Seemed like a good compromise.

But this push to explore the fringes still shows up.  I'm most attracted to the areas of science that are strange and counterintuitive.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia will attest to this, given my near obsession with things like quantum physics and the behavior of black holes.  And there's one other realm of science that allows me to do what journalist Kathryn Schulz calls "seeing the world as it isn't" -- and that's paleontology.

Because after all, things in the distant past were very, very different than they are now.  We're so used to looking around us and seeing The World As It Is that we don't often consider that this brief point in time is part of a continuum of geological and biological change, and is framed on both sides -- past and future -- by worlds that were and will be wildly different from the one we live in.

As an example, consider the paper published last week in the journal ZooKeys, which is about the fauna of the Sahara.  Immediately I said that name, I'm guessing you pictured sand dunes, perfectly clear blue skies, no plant life (maybe a palm tree or two, if there was an oasis in your imagination), and perhaps a camel or a white-robed Bedouin.

Turn the chronometer back a hundred million years, though, and you wouldn't even know it was the same place.

At that point, the Sahara was a tropical forest, with a huge bay of the Tethys Ocean (the remnant of which we now call the Indian Ocean) right in the middle.  The Atlantic Ocean had only recently opened up, and western Africa was separated from South America by a narrow strait.  What is now an unbroken swath of desert was a large island in the west, a smaller island in the middle of the central bay, and a big chunk of land to the east that is now the remainder of the continent of Africa.

A map of the continents during the late Cretaceous Period [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mannion, P. D. (2013). "The latitudinal biodiversity gradient through deep time". Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29 (1). DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2013.09.012., LateCretaceousMap, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that just scratches the surface.  The paper I referenced above, "Geology and Paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Kem Kem Group of Eastern Morocco," by a team led by Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Detroit, describes the fossil finds in the Kem Kem Group, a dazzlingly rich fossil bed that is only now beginning to be investigated thoroughly.

What this fossil bed shows us is a world that's not only drastically different from how we picture the Sahara today, it's drastically different from anything currently on Earth.  "This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth," Ibrahim said in an interview in Science Daily, "a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long."

Such a time-traveller, in their short remaining life expectancy, would meet up with such beasts as Carcharodontosaurus -- the name means "jagged-toothed lizard" -- which averaged eight meters from tip to tail, just shy of the length of an average school bus.  Its signature teeth were twenty centimeters long and serrated like steak knives.  There were twenty-meter-long crocodilians such as Aegisuchus, which were big enough to turn your average modern saltwater crocodile into saltwater taffy.  There was the fifteen-meter-long, twenty-ton Spinosaurus, another carnivore.  The skies were no safer -- there was a variety of pterodactyloids, including the flying hunter Apatorhamphus, which had a long, needle-toothed snout and a wingspan of five meters.

And that's just a sampler.

"Many of the predators were relying on an abundant supply of fish," said study co-author Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth.  "This place was filled with absolutely enormous fish, including giant coelacanths and lungfish.  The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times larger than today's coelacanth [which averages two meters in length].  There is an enormous freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth, they are like barbed daggers, but beautifully shiny."

So if you went for a swim, at least you'd have something pretty to look at while you were being messily devoured.

But the vagaries of plate tectonics and climate eventually widened the Atlantic and closed off the bay in the mid-Sahara, and the place started to dry out.  It was green for a lot longer than you'd think, however.  There's evidence that as little as seven thousand years ago, the Sahara got a great deal more rain and was much more verdant than it is today, but a shift in the path of the African monsoon turned off the tap and converted the whole area into a vast, mostly-uninhabitable desert.

I'd like to close with the beautiful and poignant words Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in his poem "In Memoriam."  I've quoted them here before, but they are so apposite there's really no fitter way to end.  Read this, and think about the Sahara -- and what your own homeland might look like in a hundred million years' time.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves, and go.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The wind beneath my wings

We're at a dire crossroads, here in the United States, with a president under investigation, foreign and domestic policy decisions being driven by far right political commentators, political appointees making statements implying they can curtail constitutionally-protected rights.  Looking at the news has become a daily exercise in fighting back a sense of horror.

So today, I'm going to consider: a rash of recent pterodactyl sightings.

I learned about this phenomenon over at Cryptozoology News, where aficionados of creatures that don't technically exist can go for updates.  It turns out that we've had a sudden spike in reports of giant winged creatures, inevitably described as "bat-like" although many times larger than the biggest bats.

And since such explanations as "the eyewitness was drunk, confused, or just making shit up" clearly aren't applicable here, we are forced to the conclusion that pterodactyloids didn't become extinct 66 million years ago, they stuck around and are now appearing in places such as Wisconsin.

In fact, the Wisconsin sighting is only one of many in the last few months.  This particular report tells of an anonymous (of course) eyewitness who last August was driving home one afternoon and saw "a weird thing flying in the sky."  The creature was estimated at being two meters in length, and had "skin on its wings instead of feathers."

"Like a bat," he said.  "It looked like a pterodactyl or some kind of angel."

For reference, let's consider each of these:

Fig. 1: A bat  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Barracuda1983, Pipistrellus flight2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fig. 2: A pterodactyloid [Image is in the Public Domain]

Fig. 3: An angel [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I think we can all agree that it'd be easy to confuse the three.

But our gentleman in Wisconsin isn't the only one to see a strange flying creature recently.  In November, a woman in Chester County, Pennsylvania saw a huge thing with wings while she was zooming down the interstate.  "I realized just how big it actually was," she said.  "The wingspan was twice the width of the car, as it flew over it and headed straight toward my car.  The feathers were black, or very dark brown.  As it flew over my car, I ducked a bit, to look up at it, through the windshield.  It was amazing to see such a beautiful sight. If I hadn’t been driving so fast – the speed limit is 70 mph – I could have attempted to take a photo."

An even bigger one was spotted only a few days later in Ohio.  A woman was driving with her fiance in Ravenna, Ohio, and stopped at a stoplight, only to see something enormous gliding overhead.  "It was two or three times larger than our SUV," she said.  "It had elbow-like wings.  It was darker than the sky.  The thing was huge."

The most recent sighting was just last week, once again in Pennsylvania, which seems to have more than its fair share of pterodactyls.  This time, a 47-year-old construction worker said he was out cutting firewood when the thing flew over.

"A large shadow appeared above me," he said.  "I ran inside to grab my phone, but by the time I came outside the bird was gone.  I’ve been terrified to go outside since that event."

He described it as a "green bird with a twenty-foot wingspan, covered in scales, [with] a spike on the end of its tail and razor-sharp talons."  He added, "It looked like a lizard."

Once again, for reference:

Fig. 4: A lizard.  [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons SajjadF, Lizard - e, CC BY 3.0]

So apparently, what we have here is a prehistoric-looking lizard angel bat-bird.  At least all the eyewitnesses agree on the fact that they're huge.

For my loyal readers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and (especially) Pennsylvania, keep your eyes on the skies, and let me know if any enormous winged creatures soar over.  Feel free to report your sightings here.  I realize seeing something like this could be scary, but the upside of it is that it'll take your mind off Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, so as far as I'm concerned, bring on the pterodactyls.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Wings over Illinois

What the hell is going on in Illinois?

Recently there have been no fewer than five separate reports of bizarre goings-on involving winged cryptids, all but one of which was sighted near Rockford.  My first thought was to wonder if Illinois had gotten the jump on Oregon and legalized psychedelic mushrooms first, but apparently this is not the case.

The first, as reported over at Phantoms and Monsters, was of a pterosaur along the Vermilion River near Danville.  Here's how the incident is described:

As he stood on the bluff looking out onto the river, he noticed a large shadowy figure gliding downstream towards him.  As it got closer, the bizarre creature became more defined.  He observed, what he described, a 'pterodactyl' gliding about 4-5 feet above the surface of the river.  DF [the eyewitness] estimated that the wingspan was approximately 25 feet, as it covered half the width of the river.  The huge flying being looked exactly like the images of the prehistoric flying dinosaur.  Long beak with a long ray on the head.  Dark gray leathery-skinned body and wings, with a long tail that flattened on the end.  It made little sound, but cast a shadow on the river as it flew just below the height of the bluff.  The water swirled as it glided past.  The beast continued gliding downstream until DF lost sight of it.  He stated that it never flapped its wings.  DF's first reaction was to get back to his house and tell his wife what he had seen.

What puzzles me here, as in many of these cases, is why he didn't think to try to take a photograph.  Almost everyone has his/her cellphone at all times; if I'd seen a supposedly-extinct creature fly past, and kept it in view long enough to watch it "gliding downstream," I'd have gotten as many photographs of it as I could.

But maybe he was so shocked that he didn't think of it till afterwards.  Or maybe he's one of the 1% who isn't constantly accompanied by a cellphone.

Gargoyle on outside portal to Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dorevabelfiore (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Then there's the person near Rockford who saw a "black winged humanoid" while standing on her deck one evening:

I was stargazing as I often do, when I was startled by the sudden furious barking of a neighbors [sic] dogs.  As I turned and looked towards the direction of the barking it was at that moment I saw an all black 7ft in length man with huge bat-like wings flying across the park that borders along my backyard.  It then descended to approximately 5 to 6 ft above ground.  It pulled or folded its wings in slightly and then glided along the paved path that runs through the park.  It continued gliding through an easement between two houses disappearing from my sight.

Afterwards, she heard a terrifying screeching noise coming from the woods in the direction the thing had gone.  The next day, a neighbor showed her that one of the posts of his chain-link fence had been bent at a 45-degree angle, and the woman mentioned seeing the flying humanoid thing.  A kid who overheard them laughed and said all she'd seen was a heron fly overhead, and she said, "A heron can't bend a fence post," which is true, but as a logical chain of reasoning, I don't think it really amounts to much.  Despite this, she says the only possible conclusion is that she saw...

... "Mothman."

Also near Rockford, we have an account from a woman who says she saw a humanoid walking, then suddenly taking flight:

The eyewitness 'KJ' states it was approximately 6am and that she was on the outside porch.  All of a sudden she observed a human-like being walking in the yard of a house on the corner of Bruce St. and Woodlawn Ave. in Rockford, IL. (about 1 block away).  The being suddenly produced a large set of wings and took flight, gliding over the back gate of the property.  It then disappeared into the trees and foliage on the next block.  There was enough morning light available for an excellent observation...  She described the being as tall and dark, almost black.  The wingspan was very broad.

The third sighting -- also near Rockford -- was of a creature that cryptid aficionados have christened, I shit you not, "Deerbat:"

I'm not sure how to describe this but what we saw was frightening.  The corn parts about 8 feet in front of my car, Idk if you have ever seen a deer jump out of corn but its like a horse hop.  This thing was the size of big buck but was completely black.  Mind you my headlights are focused right at the stretch of road and corn area, so the whole scene was well illuminated.  As it proceeded to jump out of the corn it opened these huge set of wings and remained airborne.  It flew right in front of my car and did this zig zag flight pattern incredible fast.  Almost like a fly or bug would do.  After the quick zig zags it shot straight up in to the air.  I mean shot like out was placed in a canon [sic] and blasted in the sky.

Then there's the old lady in Rockford who was shooting the breeze with a friend on her front porch, when they saw a gargoyle:

During a conversation, the friend stopped talking and began to stare across the street.  SS [the eyewitness] looked in the same direction, and noticed a dark gray winged humanoid slowly flying near a large tree.  SS stated that it seemed like the being 'was in slow motion' as it glided toward the tree.  The friend said 'do you see that?'  The witnesses were close enough to notice that it had small cat-like ears and intense red eyes.  There were no other facial features visible.  It was quite muscular throughout the body and had 2 defined legs, and had arms that attached to the wings. 

She stated that the winged humanoid was 7ft in length with a wide wing span.  The wings were like those of a bat with a leather-like membrane.  Apparently the being perched in the tree, but again took flight.  This is when SS's husband took notice.  The winged being was gliding towards a pair of large pine trees, as it's [sic] legs were 'kicking up and down' while in flight. 

The being flew between the 2 pine trees, and then suddenly 'vanished.'  SS said 'gargoyle,' and her friend acknowledged 'yes, a gargoyle.'

This brings me to an awkward question, which is: how could a seven-foot-tall, highly muscular humanoid, fly?  Flying requires a tremendous amount of exertion per unit mass, which is why most flying animals are small, or at least very lightweight for their size.  A physicist over at Yale did some analysis and found that an adult male human would have to have a wingspan of 6.7 meters (21 feet) just to get off the ground, and he admitted that this wasn't even taking into account the extra mass that the wings themselves would contribute.

Which, honestly, I find rather disappointing, as I've always wanted to have wings.  Big feathery wings coming up from my shoulders.  It'd make putting on a shirt difficult, but given that I have a penchant for running around half naked when the weather's warm anyhow, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.

But alas, no.  Having to port around 6.7-meter-long wings would be too much of an inconvenience, however fun flying looks.

So I'm a little dubious about all of these beastly goings-on in northern Illinois, and am inclined to agree with the scoffing teenager who thought people were seeing herons.  At close range, herons do have a pterodactyl-like-look, and in dim light, the brain can play some serious tricks on you.

But anyhow, if any of my loyal readers live in Illinois, I'd advise you to keep your eyes peeled and your cellphone camera apps at the ready.  Because if there are any more weird sightings of flying humanoids, I want to see photographs.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.  This book is, in my opinion, the most lucid and readable exposition of the evolutionary model ever written, and along the way takes down the arguments for Intelligent Design a piece at a time.  I realize Dawkins is a controversial figure, given his no-quarter-given approach to religious claims, but even if you don't accept the scientific model yourself, you owe it to yourself to see what the evolutionary biologists are actually saying.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The strange case of the glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl

In the past week, I've written about a few cases for which an application of the sharp edge of Ockham's Razor would be advisable -- such as claiming that clouds are produced by UFOs as camouflage, deciding that the common perception of having less time to do stuff is because time itself is actually speeding up, and warning people about the pleasures and possible hazards of "astral sex."

There should be a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor, shouldn't there?  Taking the available evidence, giving it careful consideration, and then running right off the cliff with it -- coming up with the weirdest, most convoluted, most difficult-to-swallow explanation you can.

Take the recent case of the the strange observations of a flying creature reported by a woman in Pennsylvania.  She states that she saw a "strange glowing thing at night" that flew over her car while she was driving.   It was "quite large," she said, and "was not too terribly high off the ground;" and "(it) seemed to be lit, or glowing."

Okay, that's the evidence; one woman's claim of a strange sighting. From this, what hypotheses can we devise?

• She saw an ordinary flying creature -- possibly a barn owl, whose silent flight and all-white underside could easily trick the eye into thinking that it was a glowing creature in the air.
• She was making up the story for her own reasons, possibly for the attention or because she likes to tell weird stories -- i.e., she was lying.
• She's a wingnut.
• She saw a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl. 

Now, the story that I read told little more than the bits and pieces I've quoted, and I very much got the impression that that was all there was to it -- she had no evidence, no photographs, not even a sketch of what she saw.  Just a report of a flying creature that was glowing.  I'm the first to admit that I have no particular reason to conclude that she was lying -- I don't know her, and have no desire to impugn the motives of a total stranger.  But take our four hypotheses, and you rank them for plausibility.  I ask even the wooiest woo-woo out there in the studio audience; don't you think it's more likely that she saw a barn owl, or made the whole thing up, than...  Oh, come on.  Really?  A bioluminescent pterodactyl?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

On second thought, there is a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor; it's called confirmation bias -- the acceptance of minuscule pieces of evidence to support a theory you already had decided was true.  It's why believers in astrology will crow about the one newspaper horoscope a year that happens to be reasonably accurate, and ignore all the ones that aren't; it's why the religious will proclaim it a miracle when the ill person they prayed for got better, and ignore all the people who were prayed for and died in horrible agony.  Maybe at this point I should tell you the website the glowing pterodactyl story appeared on.

It's called LivePterosaur.

Yup, there's an entire website devoted to the idea that pteranodons and other pterodactyloids have survived through the millions of years since the last fossil evidence, conveniently leaving not a trace behind in all of the geologic strata from the intervening eras, and now are gliding their way over the wilds of Pennsylvania.  A lot of the evidence, if you can call it that, comes from native legends, just as the totality of the "evidence" for Mokele-Mbembe and the Bunyip being dinosaur survivals comes from tales from the natives of central Africa and Australia, respectively.  The pterodactyl legend is apparently especially to be found in Papua New Guinea, where a flying creature called the "Ropen" supposedly haunts the rain forest; but there's the "Wawanar" of western Australia and the "Kongamato" of Africa, and also an unnamed sighting in Cuba where it presumably was called the "holy mother of god what the fuck is that thing?", only in Spanish.

Did these people actually see something strange?  Could be.  There are plenty of big birds around; in the tropics, we also have fruit bats, one group of which (the "flying foxes" of the genus Pteropus) can have a wingspan of five feet.  Could they have been lying?  Drunk?  Crazy?  Sure.  Could it just be a story, and no more true than tales of unicorns and dragons?  Sure.  And I think any of those is more likely than it being a pterodactyl.

Now, don't mistake me; no one would think it was cooler than I would if it turned out that some kind of pterodactyloid actually had survived all these years.  In fact, the pterodactyloids are somewhere in my top five favorite categories of extinct animal.  I'm also fully aware of the times that it's turned out that something has made it to the present day, after years of only being known from the fossil record.   (The most famous being the coelacanth, the prehistoric lobe-finned fish that turned out not to be so prehistoric after all.)  I just don't think that it's all that likely that somehow a giant bioluminescent pterodactyl is gliding around in the woods of Pennsylvania, and has escaped all notice of the biologists until now.  It's slightly more likely that one could live in the forests of Papua New Guinea, or central Africa, given the remoteness, dense woods, and low population density; but only slightly.  The likelihood of it being a tall tale is orders of magnitude greater.

So, sorry to be a party-pooper, but I really do think that the lady in Pennsylvania saw a barn owl.  Or else should be more careful to take her medication regularly.  Whatever it was she saw, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that it wasn't a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.

Paleontological ghosts

When I was in elementary school, I developed a fascination with extinct prehistoric animals.  Not unusual, I realize; kids love big, powerful creatures with nasty pointy teeth.  But this interest has persisted for nearly fifty years.  The thought that millions of years ago, there were on the Earth strange beasts, the likes of which we will never see again, always raises in me a sense of wonder.  In the words of Charles Darwin, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Whenever I run into someone who shares this interest, my first question is always, "What's your favorite?"  I had a student in my AP Biology class last year who is mighty fond of Anomalocaris, which in my mind has always had a rather Lovecraftian look:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Another student has actually been on paleontological digs in North Dakota, and once told me he has a soft spot in his heart for the early mammal with the euphonious name of Didelphodon:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I've always had a thing for flying animals, so my favorite group is the pterodactyloids, the best of which is the impossibly wacky-looking Rhamphorhynchus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it was with great interest that I read an article by Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe that claims that these guys might still be around.

Yes, you read that right.  Pterodactyls.  Big, leathery, weird flying reptiles.  In San Antonio, Texas, in fact.  Now, how there could be a breeding population of gigantic bird-lizards in Texas without people seeing them more often -- hell, given that it's Texas, without someone shooting one -- is a question that troubles Joshua P. Warren, investigator of all sorts of odd claims and author of the book Pet Ghosts.  

And it was undoubtedly the research for his book that drove Warren to an explanation regarding why people see pterodactyloids (and other prehistoric creatures), but said cryptids never leave any hard evidence:

They're the ghosts of extinct animals.

"It seems absurd to believe that pterosaurs might still be amongst us, but never, ever get captured or killed," Redfern writes.  "Could it be that, as Joshua Warren’s research suggests, we’re dealing with the ghosts of long dead pterodactyls?  It sounds bizarre, but if people live on after physical death, then why not animals, too?"

Well, yeah.  "If."  I'm not convinced on that last account, as you no doubt know.  And of course, the convenient thing about this explanation is that this means that the lack of evidence becomes, in some bizarre way, a support for the contention itself.  "Nothing there?  No fur, footprints, anything?  There you are, then.  It's a Ghost Saber-toothed Tiger."

So I'm still figuring that we're looking at eyewitnesses who were either (1) confused, (2) lying, (3) drunk, or (4) all of the above.  But that's unlikely to convince either Redfern or Warren.

And understand that it's not that I'm happy about this.  I'd love it if there was some way to see what these magnificent animals looked like when they were alive.  And if I couldn't see a live one, I'd settle for a ghostly one.  But unfortunately, I very much doubt if either of these is possible -- although next time I'm in Texas, I'll keep an eye out.  

Maybe the rare San Antonio Rhamphorhynchus will put in an appearance just for me.