Today's very special critter is a Chinese pterosaur from the Jurassic called jeholopterus. It was found perfectly preserved, even its hair and wing membranes. It had long grasping claws and a flat, cat-like face. Adorable, no? A flying ptero-kitty you could cuddle for hours.
Well be careful! A controversial suggestion by paleontologist David Peters is that jeholopterus behaved like a prehistoric vampire bat! Its long claws allowed it to cling to the sides of large dinosaurs and its wide-opening mouth let it thrust its strong fangs into thick skin to get to the delicious dinosaur blood within.
Peters has also suggested that jeholopterus may have had a long anglerfish-like lure on its head to help catch insects, so as you can imagine his ideas are hotly contested in the paleontology world.
History's cutest vampire or simple winged lizard-cat? We may never know for sure, but I salute brave little jeholopterus with these two pictures.
Update: It has been brought to my attention that Peters is not even a paleontologist but in fact an advertising artist who just likes making up bullshit. Apparently my dinosaur encyclopedia decided to just add his "theories" without including that last tidbit. Lame. I stand by my decision to draw jeholopterus as a vampire though, because it was fun and that is my main purpose here. But I don't want to mislead anyone about pterosaur facts, so mea culpa
3 comments:
love the little guy with the big mouth and the toes of the giant. . .
There was no lure to catch insects. That doesn't make sense if it was biting dinosaurs. See reptileevolution.com/jeholopterus.htm for the latest info.
D.P+
Thank you david peters for trying to fool people with your absurd theories.
I liked you more when you did actually good art and not these absurd theories.
There was a time where i liked you.
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