Jeholopterus

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