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On a Pterosaur

Last Updated (Monday, 09 June 2008 14:06) Written by Raymond Nakamura

 

When I saw this article about giant pterosaurs, I loved the image of the baby dinosaur being picked off like some worm. Today I'm going to peck at whatever subjects pop up.

Arts
Mark Witton, one of the scientists studying these creatures, also did the illustrations. And his colleague Darren Naish has also co-authored a book on the background of Walking with Dinosaurs. I love how that program looks like a regular natural history show using computer-animated dinosaurs.

Cultural Learnings
I'd never heard of Azhdarchids before, a group including the largest known pterosaurs, which were about four times as tall as a person. The name Azhdarchid comes from the Uzbek word for "dragon." I was intrigued to think of other countries and cultures having a matching word for an imaginary thing like a dragon, though I realize Chinese and English dragons are not the same things. Uzbek is what is spoken in Uzbekistan, not to be confused with the place where Borat is supposed to be from, though I loved that wicked movie.

History
The discussions of functional anatomy reminded me of Cuvier, a French biologist in the 1800s considered the father of this sort of study. One of his students dressed up like a devil and woke up him in the middle of the night, chanting "Cuvier, Cuvier — I have come to eat you!" Cuvier opened his eyes, and supposedly said, "All creatures with horns and hooves are herbivores. You can't eat me," then went back to sleep.

Film Studies
Naish and Witton look at four different hypotheses on how Azhdarchids fed in relation to understanding the structure of the skull, which looks like a spaceship to me. One of these models compared the behaviour to a Marabou stork, which may have been in the living room of the family in the French movie I saw at the film festival on my first date with the woman who is now my wife.

Semiotics
The best studied Azhdarchid has the genus name Quetzalcoatlus, from the Aztec version of the Mayan supreme god Kukulcan the feathered serpent to which the famous pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico is dedicated. I didn't see that when I was there, but I did get print made of my birthday using the Mayan symbols.

Fantasy

The first time I heard about Quetzalcoatl was when I read Velikovsky's weird books that attempts to explain various mythological stories through postulated astronomical events such as the formation of Venus. Later I heard that scientists said the science made no sense, but the history was interesting; and the historians said the history made no sense, but the science sounded interesting. Various people including Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould refuted his work.

Philosophy

Regular paleontology has some weird stuff in it too and the evidence is hard to come by. But they do continue to test their ideas against the evidence they have, which seems to be one of the fundamentals of doing science.

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