“See,” said his friend, “a bird flaps his wings and rises. Some birds can glide for hours and hardly ever flap their wings. But many of the flying lizards could not flap their wings at all. They had to climb up a tree or a cliff with their claws and then throw themselves into space. Then, with the start they thus got, they could swoop and glide and swirl for quite a long time. When the spurt was over, they would have to find some new place up which to climb. Some of them, if they were on a flat plain, would die.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Largest Creature That Ever Flew.
Pteranodon, the flying reptile, twenty-one feet from tip to tip of “wings,” the last of a giant race, soaring over the Cretaceous ocean.
Courtesy of D. Appleton & Co.
A Flying Nightmare of Olden Time.
Dimorphodon Macronyx, size of a small dog, one of the minor terrors of the air, ten million years ago. Restoration from Seeley, in “Dragons of the Air”; pose of restoration questionable, as fore-legs could not be used for walking.
“Even the Pteranodon?”