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Perching Pterosaur, not Woodpecker

Dale A. Drinnon has another explanation for pterosaur sightings in Southern California. He now says it’s a woodpecker. In his blog post “Living Pterosaurs of Hollywood,” he says:

This sounds like possibly another series of sightings of an outsized woodpecker similar to the Ivory-billed woodpecker, already suspected from “Pteranodon” sightings from further North in California and in Oregon. There is a larger species related to the Ivory-Billed woodpecker native to Mexico but it is thought to be extinct. The creature which is reported as a pterosaur perches upright, which no kind of a pterosaur could do.

I’d better explain the context. Drinnon says that after what looks like a quote, but I haven’t been able to find the source, after I Googled on his text. Maybe he was quoting correctly. If he did, with “Jonathan David Whitcomb states on Facebook” then I accept that is what was written on Facebook. It relates to the May 13th sighting this year, a little southeast of Griffith Park. The animal was called a pterosaur by the eyewitness and she said that it had no feathers but it did have a head crest.

Here are some problems with what Drinnon has said:

  • He said “perching” but the May 13th sighting had a “pterosaur” flying over a freeway. It did not perch.
  • He said no kind of pterosaur can perch but the kind that is often reported in Southern California looks like a member of Rhamphornynchoidea, which could perch.
  • He said a woodpecker could be what is being seen, but almost all sightings are of much larger flying creatures, far bigger than any woodpecker.
  • He said sightings in Southern California are related to “Pteranodon sightings” further north in California and in Oregon but he does not say why those might be related to sightings in Southern California.
  • He thinks the head crest mentioned by the May 13th eyewitness is the same thing as what some woodpeckers have, but she chose only pterosaur images from a survey. Drinnon says nothing about that survey.
  • He thinks none of the eyewitnesses are capable of determining that they had seen flying creatures that were not birds. Why does Drinnon think he can judge all those persons when his own judgment has not been sufficiently proven? Has he even questioned any eyewitness of a strange flying creature?

Does a Pterosaur Perch?

It could be that Drinnon was thinking about the Lakewood, California, sighting that happened last June, in 2012. The eyewitness said that the “dragon-pterodactyl” was perched on a telephone cable just a little overhead. But she also described a long tail with a “triangle” at tail end, as I recall. That would make it the type of pterosaur that had digits on the feet that could perch, for that would be a basal pterosaur.

Dragons or Pterosaurs Over Interstate-5

Right between the Los Angeles River and Griffith Park—that’s where the three “dragons” were flying on March 3, 2013, at 6:10 a.m., but another driver on the I-5 Freeway saw one “pterosaur” ten weeks later, just a little over a mile south of the first sighting location.

California Ropens – Are They Woodpeckers?

Immediately after mentioning the woodpecker interpretation of pterosaur sightings in California, the skeptic said, “The creature which is reported as a pterosaur perches upright, which no kind of a pterosaur could do.” Well, that old generalization no longer applies, for we now know that one type of pterosaur could indeed perch upright, and that long-tailed variety just happens to be . . . yes, the same general type observed perching upright on a telephone line in Lakewood, California, on June 19, 2012: the long-tailed variety.

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Darren Naish Comments on Pterosaur Fossils

On the Live Pterosaur post “Pterosaur Extinction Revisited,” the well-known pterosaur fossil expert Darren Naish has given two comments in twelve days. Few paleontologists give much attention to cryptozoological investigations, at least until recently.

First Comment (excerpt):

By the end of the Late Cretaceous, it seems that only two or three pterosaur lineages were still in existence – there were not, so far as we know, 100s of species representing numerous lineages. Those Late Cretaceous pterosaur lineages persist to the end of the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous, but are absent from the fossil record of the entire Cenozoic. There is thus every reason for thinking that pterosaurs (a) were already at low diversity at the very end of the Late Cretaceous, and (b) died out during the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Late Cretaceous. There is no evidence for post-Cretaceous pterosaurs . . .

Question:

How many pterosaur fossils have been discovered and dated in the Cretaceous?

Answer (excerpt of second comment):

. . . Pterosaurs are not numerous fossils for several obvious reasons, but we’re talking about 1000s of specimens (Bennett, in his 2001 osteology of _Pteranodon_, refers to 1100 specimens of _Pteranodon_ alone). Nevertheless, there are several key references that at least give a good idea of the taxa involved, most notably…

Barrett, P. M., Butler, R. J., Edwards, N. P. & Milner, A. R. 2008. Pterosaur distribution in time and space: an atlas. Zitteliana B, 28, 61-107.

What I would ask is this: “Related to the statement ‘there is no evidence for post-Cretaceous pterosaurs,’ was there any evidence for post-Cretaceous Coelacanths before the discovery of the living Coelacanths?”

I would also ask, “Is it possible that at least a few of those thousands of discovered pterosaur fossils actually prevented the strata from being dated as post-Cretaceous?” Could there have been any inadvertant circular reasoning in this assumption that all pterosaur fossils have been from ancient life?

The problem with getting an objective evaluation of this fossil dating is in the deeply-entrenched assumption of pterosaur extinction and the assumption that they only lived many millions of years ago. That could have influenced the dating of some of the strata from which the pterosaur fossils were taken, invalidating the claim that all those fossils had been proven to be ancient.

If Mr. Naish is correct, however, in the claim that popular axioms of paleontology make modern pterosaurs extremely unlikely, then the discovery of one or more species of living pterosaur would strongly support Biblical Creation axioms and repudiate Darwin’s. You cannot have it both ways, claiming one thing contrary to what your opponent predicts, then saying it means nothing when your opponent’s prediction turns out to be correct.

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Pterosaur Expert

Of course we don’t mean “fossil expert” when we use the phrase “pterosaur expert,” for this is not a paleontology blog but a cryptozoology blog. In regard to the ropen of Papua New Guinea, I think that Paul Nation and Garth Guessman are the most experienced explorers who have searched for living pterosaurs in that part of the world. But others have made great contributions.

I quote from Whitcomb’s Pterosaur Eyewitness blog, in particular the post titled, “Experts on Living Pterosaurs.” By the way, although Whitcomb does not have as much experience exploring remote areas of the world, he may have more access to eyewitnesses around the world than any other cryptozoologist, in regard to sightings of what seem to be modern pterosaurs, even though his interviews are mostly by emails.

About Paul Nation

Paul was instrumental in helping organize the two ropen expedition of 2004, both of which were searches on Umboi. He was unable to go along that year but had his own expedition with Jacob Kepas, late in 2006, deep in the mainland of Papua New Guinea. That expedition resulted in one daylight sighting of a giant indava by Kepas and several nighttime indava-light sightings by Nation. The video footage recorded by Nation in 2006, showing two glowing objects near the top of a ridge near Tawa Village, was found to be strange: not any camp fires or airplane lights or flash lights or meteors any other commonplace explanation.

About Garth Guessman

Guessman’s knowledge of Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur fossils allowed him to notice an important clue . . . [Guessman and Woetzel] learned that the native traditions describe the ropen‘s tail as being stiff, never moving except near where it connects to the body. Guessman recognized that this relates to the stiffening extension rods of Rhamphorhynchoid vertebrae: all but a few vertebrae are locked into stiffness; the few that are flexible are near where the pterosaur’s tail connects to the body.

Others have made contributions, over the years, including Professor Peter Beach, James Blume, Jacob Kepas, and Phillip O’Donnell.

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