Woodpeckers, Flintstones, and Long-Tailed Pterosaurs

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Reply to a Post by Dale A. Drinnon: “Cuban Pterosaurs?”

How far some skeptics will go to find a non-pterosaur explanation for pterosaur sightings! Featherless long-tailed flying creatures with long bony head crests are not misidentifications of woodpeckers, but there is more. Dale Drinnon has made some apparently accurate generalizations about the two main groups of those featherless pterosaurs; unfortunately he looked no deeper. It’s true that many fossils can be divided into “basal” and Pterodactyloid types:

  1. long-tailed ones without a head crest
  2. short-tailed ones with a head crest

But that is a generalization, and real progress in science often requires careful examination of exceptions. In this case, there is a long-tailed pterosaur, known from fossils, that did indeed have a head crest, contrary to the general assumption proclaimed as if universal by Mr. Drinnon.

Even more to the point, that particular species was reported still living just a few centuries ago: non-extinct. John Goertzen wrote a paper for the 1998 International Conference on Creation, held in Geneva, Pennsylvania. The name of that scientific paper is “The Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaur Scaphognathus crassirostris: A ‘Living Fossil’ Until the 17th Century.”

I will not quote from it here, but the point is simple: One species, known from fossils, had both a long tail and a head crest, and if one exception existed, one long-tailed pterosaur with a head crest, living a few centuries ago in the Eastern Hemisphere, why should we be shocked at another exception, a long-tailed “pterodactyl” with a head crest, living a few decades ago in Cuba?

At least one investigator seems to have found significant evidence that the Scaphognathus crassirostris lived up until the 1600’s in and around the Mediterranean. Many eyewitness have seen long-tailed pterosaurs with head crests in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in various parts of the world; I’ve interviewed many of them myself. Eyewitnesses continue to accumulate, so I suggest that Mr. Drinnon get used to this concept.

Flintstones Cartoons in Detail

Before getting into the woodpecker interpretation of pterosaur sightings in Cuba, consider what Drinnon has declared in his post “Cuban Pterosaurs.”

The mixed-trait Pterosaurs do not exist in Paleontology but they DO occur commonly in popular cartoons such as The Flintstones in the 1960s.

We have already seen that some pterosaurs with what Drinnon calls “mixed-trait” characteristics do indeed exist in paleontology. Now let’s look at the Flintstones, with an eye for any appearance of a pterosaur with that combination of long tail and head crest.

The standard opening of at least some of those cartoons includes a couple of dinosaurs but no pterosaurs.

Season #1, episode #18 has a large bird with feathers, nothing suggesting a pterosaur.

“A Man Called Flintstone,” Part One, at 01:31 (one minute and thirty-one seconds from the beginning), has a pterosaur in the mid-ground WITH NO TAIL. At 1:37, that same flying creature appears much clearer because it’s much closer, filling most of the vertical and about half of the horizontal portion of the screen, again with NO TAIL. I scanned the fifteen minutes of Part One, without seeing any other pterosaur.

I then looked at Season #3, episode #14 (“Dial ‘S’ For Suspicion,” Part 1). At 5:20 a bird with feathers has a beak that is used as a letter opener; the bird has no head crest and no tail and nothing that would suggest it is anything other than a bird with feathers. At 8:00, Fred uses the beak of a small bird as a writing tool; that bird has a small head crest that appears like it is feathered; the tail also appears like the tail of feathered birds, in fact at 8:11 the tail is seen more clearly and it is definitely a feathered bird tail, nothing like any tail of any pterosaur. At 10:26, a writing-tool bird appears with even more obvious feathers on both head and tail, even more obviously a bird. At 11:39 that same feathered bird appears, with that same appearance.

Now consider an episode that was aired on October 1, 1961, “The Rock Quarry Story.” I saw nothing in the first ten minutes of that episode that had any flying creature of any kind.

What about season #3, episode #6, “Here’s Snow in Your Eyes,” Part One? I also did a quick scan of that episode (on Youtube, like the others). I saw no flying creature at all.

In no Flintstones cartoon did I see anything remotely like what the skeptic declares exists. I have no desire to continue scanning through those old animations, but I see another problem with the Flintstones conjecture.

Another Flintstones-Cartoon Problem

Mr. Drinnon has brought up those cartoons as one possible source of the idea of long-tailed pterosaurs with head crests, and he said, about the eyewitness reports, “they are reporting accurate portrayals of fantasies.” I suggest Mr. Drinnon has allowed his own imagination to run away with his reasoning, concerning the Flintstones cartoons.

Even if those characteristics of a “mixed-trait” pterosaur were portrayed commonly in those cartoons, that would not likely cause two separate eyewitnesses to report those details in large flying creatures at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1965 and in 1971; Drinnon fails to provide any clear reason why that strange mental image-transport would happen.

Think about this: Have you ever read about or heard about anything in a Flintstones cartoon coming up in anything like a hallucination or confirmed misidentification, with two eyewitnesses of something similar that was seen in the same location?

To be more precise, have you ever seen anything in your neighborhood park that looked like something from a Flintstones cartoon? Did that encounter cause you to report that thing as if it were real? Did you later learn that somebody else had seen that same Flintstones image in that same park and also reported it as a real object? How ridiculous! Cartoons do not cause two eyewitnesses to see something that appears very similar but that is far different from what was actually there.

I find it astonishing that somebody would suggest such an idea while declaring that other persons, namely eyewitnesses, have been involved in a fantasy. I declare that the Flintstones conjecture is a fantasy.

Knocking on Wood for Woodpeckers

Drinnon pins far too much weight onto the wings of a bird. His post includes a link to the Wikipedia page “Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” where it says that this bird is (or was, if extinct) “smaller” than the American Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Now let’s leave Wikipedia and go back to Drinnon’s post.

Drinnon appears to try to connect a “Giant Hornbill” with a ropen with a “20 foot wingspan.” In the very next sentence, he refers to a “known giant bird,” and in the sentence after that, he says that bird is the “Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker.” But immediately after that sentence we see that link to Wikipedia, that page that tells us that the Cuban variety (or species) is slightly smaller than the American woodpecker.

I don’t know where he gets the wingspan of “20 foot” for a “ropen.” If he refers to the two “pterodactyls” observed by Eskin Kuhn in 1971, that wingspan appears too large; if he refers to the larger ropens reported in Papua New Guinea, that wingspan appears too small. Drinnon gives no explanation for why he mentioned the number twenty.

But regardless of the existence or non-existence of a giant Hornbill bird with a wingspan of twenty feet, that size has no relevance to Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cuban or American, presently extinct or not.

Pterosaur Eyewitness Eskin Kuhn

For eastern Cuba, in and around Guantanamo Bay at least, we have two shotguns for shooting down woodpeckers. The first eyewitness who came forward with a report of a living “pterodactyl” in eastern Cuba was U.S. Marine Eskin C. Kuhn. Here is the sketch that he drew within minutes of his encounter with two huge flying creatures:

Perosaur Sketch by Eskin Kuhn
Kuhn saw two pterosaurs in Cuba, in 1971

I know that a camera in his hands could have provided a more objective image of those two flying creatures observed by that U.S. Marine in 1971. But Mr. Kuhn put his artistic talents to good use, and it seems very unlikely to me that he would have been greatly mistaken in many ways. But he was not alone. Another shotgun obliterates the woodpecker conjecture.

Pterosaur Eyewitness Patty Carson

Eskin Kuhn reported his sighting of two “pterodactyls” decades ago, with his sketch. Patty Carson saw what appears to have been the same species of flying creature, about six years earlier. She immediately reported the encounter to her father on the base of Guantanamo Bay, but none of the adults believed her, so she stopped telling people about it.

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Gitmo Pterosaur of Guantanamo Bay Cuba, sighting in 1965

Patty Carson saw this creature in the same area of Cuba, around 1965

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Patty Carson saw one “dinosaur,” compared with the two “pterodactyls” seen by Eskin Kuhn, and she was a child at the time, walking home with her younger brother, but Kuhn was an adult. But notwithstanding differences in descriptions, significant resemblances in the two reports are striking.

Carson sent me an email in April of 2011, soon after she had googled “Pterodactyl in Cuba” and found Kuhn’s sighting report. We had extensive email interview sessions through mid-2011, and she drew a sketch of the creature she had seen. Fortunately she too is a talented artist.

One critical point about Patty’s report is this: She is sure of the many small teeth in the mouth of the flying creature. And woodpeckers, no matter how large, and whether extinct or not, have no teeth.

Misidentification Possibility, in Conclusion

We always need to be alert to the possibility of a misidentification when we first encounter a sighting report of an apparent pterosaur. But this two-sighting case at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the mid-twentieth century, appears unlikely to ever be seriously challenged with any misidentification conjecture, be it a giant woodpecker or any other bird, with teeth or without. This two-sighting case for living pterosaurs in eastern Cuba is just too tight for a woodpecker to squeeze into, notwithstanding how strange some persons may think it is to have a long-tailed head-crested pterosaur living in modern times.

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Live Pterosaurs Versus Extinct Woodpeckers

According to Huntington, eyewitness accounts of featherless flying creatures with head crests and long tails, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not from the imaginations of persons who had watched too many Flintstones cartoons. He suggests that the most modern insights into pterosaur fossils allow for the possibility that a large long-tailed pterosaur species with a head crest might very well have lived, and might still be living.

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California Ropens – Are They Woodpeckers?

I am actually grateful that one skeptic brought up a woodpecker interpretation for sightings of apparent pterosaurs on the west coast of the United States . . . sort of. It kicked me off my comfortable couch, to search for more information about woodpeckers and other birds, and to learn about pterosaurs that perch and birds that do not perch.

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Pterosaurs not Extinct

Live “pterodactyls?” In the United States? Many scientists have long assumed all pterosaurs died millions of years ago. Now take a whirlwind tour of many years of investigations in cryptozoology, and prepare for a shock: At least two species of pterosaurs have survived, uncommon, not so much rare as widely, thinly distributed.

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