“We all have a dinosaur deep within us…”
Colin Mochrie
All small boys have at least a transient fascination with dinosaurs. If you have asked a very young me my favourite, I probably would have said Pterodactyls. I was impressed with their soaring and shrieking through the skies. The whole package seemed pretty terrifying to me. So, not for the first time in this blog I have to correct an error or misconception made by younger me. The first fossil specimen of a Pterodactyl was described in 1784 by the Italian scientist, Cosimo Alessandro. Pterodactyls had remarkable longevity, their fossil record extents through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, basically the entire age of dinosaurs. Sadly, here lies the problem. They are not dinosaurs. Pterodactyls are in fact best considered as flying reptiles, and have their own separate species called Pterosaurs. It is now accepted that dinosaurs evolved into modern birds, but it was not via Pterodactyls. Birds more likely evolved through animals such as the feathered Velociraptors, the bin chicken of the dinosaur age. #correctingtherecordagain
Pen Paint and Scalpel 