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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsREAL LIFE DRAGON Of Sorts With 70-80 Foot Wing Span DID ONCE EXIST! And It Was Not Vegetarian.
Terrifying monster flying creatures dominated the skies of our planet for millions of years. Danger was not just on the ground. They were featured on a recent Youtube documentary.
Paleontologists are making astounding discoveries every day. One of the most publicly ignored dinosaurs are pterodactyls. These flying dinosaurs existed for 120 million years in various forms. The largest flying dinosaur to with fossil evidence had a 40 foot wing span. No fossil has been found YET but there is evidence of a flying dinosaur with an estimated wing span of a 70-80 feet. Tracks have been found the show such a creature existed.
This creature would ruin your prehistory picnic. Computer modeling suggests that it was 7 feet from ground to hip bone. Besides being fish eaters these creatures dined on dinosaur eggs and probably carrion. And these creatures walked on what would be their elbows. They were our first flying creatures and came in many sizes.
Maybe they did not breath fire, but they did not have to.
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)Archae
(46,358 posts)See? They were even in Starfleet!
dalton99a
(81,636 posts)TheMastersNemesis
(10,602 posts)TheMastersNemesis
(10,602 posts)Not good at linking.
dalton99a
(81,636 posts)muriel_volestrangler
(101,390 posts)---snip---
Dino Frey (Natural History Museum of Karlsruhe) is featured with a giant wing bone from Israel having only a cylindrical body without articular ends. Looks to be about 8 inches in diameter, more than 8 feet long (60-foot, 18 m wingspan or twice the size of Quetzalcoatlus). It made the news here and here. Giant pterosaurian footprints from Mexico appear to confirm the size, all discovered prior to 2005, still not published.
On that note:
Mark Witton reported on the DML in 2008, However, subsequent reappraisals of the alleged discoveries suggested that the footprints belong to a large theropod dinosaur and the wing bone is, in fact, a particularly large piece of fossil wood (E. Frey, pers. comm. 2007), suggesting claims of 20 m flying reptiles were somewhat premature.
Yes, even PhDs sometimes make mistakes. And later in the video the giant pterosaur bone is confirmed as wood. Other problems youll no doubt recognize. Lots of bad and speculative propaganda here.
https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/largest-flying-creature-ever-video-on-youtube/
So in reality, we're back at the estimates of around 40 feet as the largest wingspans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatzegopteryx
Voltaire2
(13,213 posts)marylandblue
(12,344 posts)Dragons have a specialized fire-producing organ called a volcanus and an insulated esophagus. These soft organs rarely survive fossilization, so they could have breathed fire.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,390 posts)Perhaps the YouTube feature wasn't a very good documentary after all.
Pterosaurs are a separate group from dinosaurs, though thought to be more closely related to them than to crocodiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur
Pterodactyls are a sub-group of pterosaurs (containing most of the best-known pterosaurs. Strange to see them called 'publicly ignored', when they've turned up in things from Conan Doyle's 1912 The Lost World, through the original King Kong, and onwards.
madokie
(51,076 posts)was sure enough shitting fire you can bet on that
BumRushDaShow
(129,662 posts)How the hell did the Flintstones go long distances then?
(i.e., it wasn't "publicly ignored" - but per other posters in this thread, there is a lot of confusion about these creatures)