Pterodactyls
The pterodactyl as we know it today was an extraordinary beast, elegant in design. But for most of the last two centuries, pterodactyls have been portrayed as ugly, evil, and repulsive. The first pterodactyl remains were found in a limestone quarry in Bavaria, Germany, in the late 1700's. In 1809, French anatomist Georges Cuvier bestowed the name Pterodactylus (meaning wing finger) on the fossil and decided the creature's closest living relatives would be reptiles.
Almost since that day, illustrators began depicting pterodactyls as flying fiends-part bat, part bird, part crocodile-covered with dark leathery skin. The flying-devil image of pterodactyls became standard in popular writing as well as in science texts. In the 1912 novel The Lost World, the English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle imagined explorers stumbling upon a Brazilian plateau where Mesozoic creatures survived to the 1900's. Doyle's pterodactyls are hideous aerial scavengers that drip noxious drool as they swoop down to bite at the human interlopers. A giant pterodactyl in the 1933 motion picture King Kong was fashioned after the same image. It had black, reptilian wings, and its role in the script was to try to steal the female star, Fay Wray, by grabbing at her with its monstrous hind claws.
In the 1960's and 1970's, most museum displays and textbooks still presented pterodactyls as nightmarish beasts with batlike skin. Not only were they unappealing to look at, but these pterodactyls also were reconstructed as sloppy fliers. Pterodactyl wings were thought to be merely limp expanses of skin, making the cumbersome beasts incapable of efficient soaring flight or powerful flapping.
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