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Eurwentala β How not to draw pterosaurs
Published: 2011-10-23 14:10:25 +0000 UTC; Views: 5974; Favourites: 88; Downloads: 1
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Two David Peters -style pterosaurs. Peters' methods and reconstructions are not generally accepted among paleontologists, and, to be honest, his pterosaurs look more like fantasy creatures than actual living animals.I know he should probably be completely ignored, but these sure are fun to draw. I don't know how badly I'm mispreseting his ideas, but both are drawn after material found from his website.
Below is the Eudimorphodon-like basal pterosaur MPUM 6009. The upper guy is the hilarious bipedally running Quetzalcoatlus.
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Comments: 77
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if i was to make a fantasy story would these things work then?
because i won't lie it DOES look pretty neat, even though it is painfully wrong for a pterosaur
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Sure, nothing wrong with some really weird fantasy pterosaurs.
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just a few tweaks to anatomy and boom instantly better
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I made my own Peterosaur, based on his vision of a swimming Quetzalcoatlus (without the hairdo):Β ceratopsia.deviantart.com/art/β¦
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Nice - you actually make it look pretty convincing.
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Thank you, and yours as well
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D.Peters is a Perfect Artist but not a good scientist.
DGS always make some mistakes.And there is no evidence to show that these animals have theΒ organs like he said.
but it doesn't matter-They looks cool,and also no evidence to show that these animals cannot have these organs(That's why he is a bad sci-worker-Notice that there is no way of disproving this statement and can't repeat them.).
I like to use Peters'pterosaurs in my painting,sculpting and novel,and I'll told everyone who watch them these is the personal opinion and not the truth.
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I love everything about David peters's pterosaurs except how wrong they are. I love the Azdharchid, it really captures the awkwardness of the peterosaurs
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Haha, thanks. They are awesome creatures.
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Your welcome
And yeah if only david peters was right
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WHO's THAT POKΓMON?!
(Sorry it needed to be said..)
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it's peterosaur!
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Poor Dave, his work shows nicely why it's important to look at real specimens not just photographs. Imagine a surgeon who only ever looked at medical text I never practiced on cadavers. Photoshop is no substitute for the real thing.
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Strangely enough MPUM 6009 looks like it should work if only the legs hips and feet were more robust, and didn't have a membrane. The Quetzalcoatlus is absurd however, so you hit the mark on that.
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Only this is a lot more reasonable than a lot of his stuff.
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It is? I was trying to show some of the more outlandish features.
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These look more like dragons than pterosaurs!
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Now that you say it, yes they do.
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Recently gandered at this [link] on his blog, The Pterosaur Heresies (a total rip-off from Bakker's book, btw). Apparently, he has an odd way of looking at cladograms. The one in the blog branches from left-to-right, but he follows it from the top down (or "north-to-south", as he puts it). He appears to be under the impression that the scientific consensus holds that pterosaurs are most closely related to phytosaurs or some such nonsense. I can't tell if he has some kind of mental defficiency that prevents him from properly understand a phylogenetic tree, or if he's doing deliberatly just to add credence to his assinine "theory".
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Wow. He seriously has no idea whatsoever how to read trees. Well, no wonder why he's so confused.
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Wouldn't you think a running Quetzalcoatlus would look awkward with that long neck?
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Umm, yes. Definitely. Or rather, it would fall on it's nose every time it stops running. 
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I saw his reconstuctions.I was not impressed with the designs.His theories are really weird.
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They sure are weird. Too bad he would be a great paleoartist if he just... well, did something sensible once in a while.
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Exactly my point.
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Bwahahaha, THANK YOU for drawing this, but yours is.... surprisingly good looking, considering what you work with.
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Hehe, thanks. I suppose. I kind of enjoyed drawing them too.
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I burst out laughing when I saw his animation of quetzalcoatlus running on two legs.
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Me too, actually. 
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My sister just doesn't get why it is so funny.
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Cool.
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the one in front really creeps me out but this is WAY better than I could draw...
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While his pterosaurs are admittedly bonkers, Peters is (or was,) one of the greatest palaeoartists of the last three decades. Thus, while finding his theories seriously wrong, I have great respect in him as an artist.
His recent website, reptileevolution.org, is chock-full of neat skeletals of all sorts of animals, a pity they are hard to trust.
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Unfortunately, even appearently unmolested skeletals like those of choristoderes are hideously inaccurate sometimes. The only thing decent on that site was a picture comparing the skulls of Champsosaurus and Simoedosaurus
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True. I haven't seen his old books, just a picture here and there online. But they do look very good.
As I said to Osmatar earlier, if his site could be trusted, it would be one of the best paleo resources in the internet. Shame.
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His portfolio website has free pdfs of some of his older work, check it out
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I've read into his stuff. Wow. I really was at a loss for words. Not because it seemed like it was all bullshit, but because...well...what if it wasn't? The possibility that the guy is right is more frightening and fantastical than the FACT that he's nuts.
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Er, no. His essays are hilariously self-contradictory; for instance, his claims that pterosaur humerii are thinner than their femurs is blantantly proven worng by his OWN skeletals.
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Exactly. He's not measuring things right, and he's assuming a lot of funky sediment to be integumentary features on the animals.
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Yes they are completely bonkers, but at the same time they highlight one important thing - we don't know who these beast really looked ? The animals of the past may have been stabbed than thought, and in some ways, that is being proved. Compsognathus may have been more like a Grebe that the skinny little 'lizard' we portray it as, Deinonychus may have been plumed more like a male Common Turkey rather than the lithe killer we portray it as ... Yes these constructions are laughable but in a way the real things could've been far more bizarre !
I can't help thinking what if Peters is doing some weird paleo-performance art, and designing these weird concepts and saying what he says to prove a point ?!
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Performance art would actually be one of the more reasonable explanations for both David Peters and BANDits.
You're right that the real animals might have had far more bizarre soft-tissue ornaments, color patterns and habits than even Peters can come up with. I feel some of the more respected paleontologists are sometimes even too carefully dismissing all the curious feats that make real animals so interesting.
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I know, right? I once had someone blatantly say that turtles couldnt climb trees, despite the fact that they most certainly can. The "arrogance" of the scientific elite is sometimes a problem, even Darren Naish agrees with that, in regards to Cryptozoology especially.
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What, turtles climb trees? Sounds like quite a stunt for an animal with a shell. Cool. Are there pictures?
And yes, some researchers are rather too quick to say something's impossible if they haven't heard of it or can't imagine it right away. It's a delicate balance between too gullible and too sceptic.
And in paleontology especially, researches tend to make wide claims about the general habits of a whole group of animals without remembering to mention that there sure were oddballs and excpetions in there. And, I think, sometimes with far more certainty than we actually have. Say, "tyrannosaurs were primarily hunters, not scavengers" or "deinonychosaurs hunted small prey" or "dinosaurs did not hunt in packs".
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[link]
A fence, but you get the idea, they can climb trees just as easily.
As an amateur cryptozoologist, as well as amateur naturalist, I am constantly appaled at how scientists fob off every image of bigfoot as "monkey suits" for example, or similar things, Darren Naish does a good job of being the opposite of this, doing his best to properly appraise claims of cryptids, like he did with Caddy.
Well, the scavenger bit, there is no such thing as a large terrestrial obligate scavenger, even hyenas hunt. Only birds can be obligate scavengers.
Also, I do think raptors were mainly solitary, and hynuted prey appropriate to their size, one velociraptor could tackle a protoceratops, and chances are a deinonychus could best a tenontosaur on its own, imagine a utahraptor, surely it could polish off an iguanodon with no trouble. I think so partly because they seem to use their claws like eagles, to pierce vulnerable blood vessels and nerves, also, because they seem analogous to big cats, at least in my eyes.
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"Also, I do think raptors were mainly solitary, and hynuted prey appropriate to their size, one velociraptor could tackle a protoceratops..."
Sounds plausible, but it doesn't mean there were no social raptors, insectivorous raptors, long-distance runners (at least relative to their relatives), mostly carrion-feeders and so on. Just as there are insectivorous hyenas, social big cats and other oddballs in modern animals - and modern animals we only know from one point in time. How much more variation could fit in a whole evolutionary branch living for tens of millions of years?
And of course, everything's not visible in the bones and even if it is, we might simply be unable to know what to look for, since there are no modern analogues whatsoever. I'm pretty sure if, say, all antelopes were extinct, paleontologists would not look at a duiker skull and say right away "hey, this one was a carnivore."
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That is exactly why I choose to believe the whole Lindsay Lohan issue is one decade long performance art piece - it's undoubtedly makes her the greatest actress ever. XD
That is why Frederick Spindler is my favorite paleo-artist. Some of his concepts are strange yet we get the sense of realism and credibility. I feel like paleontology needs to take a bit of a turn into the field of speculation a bit more.
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