Pteradactyl from "Animal Ghosts"


Just a couple of the wondrous pics to be found in this gem of a book. 

 Here are animal couple of shorts from the book Animal Ghosts (don't know why it was called that), that I discovered back in elementary school. One shows how birds eventually outcompeted pterosaurs as they grew more advanced. The other proposes hat living pterodactyls might survive in Africa. The local name for the alleged pterosaur is kongomatu"".  Evidence of a lost land somewhere in Africa? Well, I recently posted an article where a flying pterosaur-like beast was assumed to have flown in from Pal-ul-don! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Madagascar's Extinct Fauna

Image
Extinct animals of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, and nearby islands. Clockwise from right: Reunion White Dodo, Mauritian Common Dodo, Mauritian broad-billed parrot, Mauritian Blue Pigeon, Magaladaptis (Madagascar Giant Lemur), Reunion Solataire (a dodo cousin), Reunion Parrot, Seycelles Giant Tortoise, Mauritian Red Rail, Madagascar Coua, Reunion Crested Starling, Madagascar Elephant Bird, Madagascar Pygmy Hippo The above painting is from the Time Life Nature Library volume on Africa. All of the animals are now extinct, and only three of them are actually from Madagascar, the rest from nearby islands. These happen to be the most striking and the largest, however: the elephant bird, the pygmy hippo, and the giant lemur Magaladaptis .  The island of Madagascar once harbored a unique megafauna all its own. It was not originally part of Africa, but split off from the Indian subcontinent, which at the time had to have sported a great assortment of pro-simians from before true monkeys evol
Read more

The Vanished Animals of East Africa

Image
UPDATED, with full pages from book. As a child, one of the most engrossing books I ever happened upon was this national geographic book at the South Bend library, called Animals of east Africa, by Louis Leakey, who is famous for digging up remains of our own half-ape ancestors. I was astonished to find a chapter of the book entitled "The Vanished" which was devoted to prehistoric African fauna, other than australopithicines.  There, before me, was a painting of two AFRICAN TIGERS having brought own an eland.  Now as everyone knows these days, an African tiger is a contradiction in terms. When I showed my dad, he was astonished too, and said, "Read it. You might learn something." This painting, and others in this chapter, were by famed palaeoartist Jay Matternes. I recognized his work as being by the same artist I'd encountered in many other prehistoric books, although, back then, I didn't know his name. He was and is, one of my very favorite paleo-artists, a
Read more

The Evolution of Spinosaurus

Image
 Back when I was  kid, I remember book pictures of Spinosaurus , depicting it as a generic theropod, like Allosaurus or Megalosaurus , with an enormous Dimetrodon -like fin on its back. Even the dinosaur toy-company Carnegie named for the Carnegie Museum depicted their Spinosaurus that way at the time. Some depictions even showed it in a quadrupedal, Dimetrodon -like pose. Spinosaurus Aegypticus was first discovered in Egypt during the early part of last century, and was only known from a series of gigantic spines arising from its back and few jaw fragments, indicating a large theropod. The remains were housed in a museum in Germany until they were infamously destroyed in a bombing rid during WWII. So even these valuable remnants were destroyed, having survived millions of years and we had merely that photographs of these to go by.  Since there was virtually nothing to go on so far as what the rest of it looked like, some Spinosaurus depictions in fiction tended to be downright fanc
Read more