Please understand my intentions with the following humor, for I do not downplay the importance of paleontologists; they are essential, the experts in learning from fossils. But the fox has his or her own specialty and the paleontologist likewise. The point? Cryptids are outside paleontology and an apparent lack of fossils in certain categories of strata should not be viewed as strong evidence for extinction of a general type of organism.

What’s the difference between a fox and a paleontologist? After a successful hunt, one is lick’n bones of chicken; the other is pick’n bones of therizinosaurus. It makes no rhyme, but a paleontologist is not usually associated with light verse: Don’t confuse Darren Naish and Ogden Nash.

How else is a fox like a paleontologist? When fully mature, neither one should be mistaken for a playful puppy, else you may be lick’n your wounds. More important, both of them can sometimes roam outside their proper place.

One Monsterquest episode involved an expedition to New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. On the surface, it appeared to be a search for giant nocturnal flying creatures that some cryptozoologists believe are modern living pterosaurs (in reality, it was a dramatic production project to make an intertaining show; it was not a scientific investigation). Of all the potential explorers to take with them, Monsterquest chose a paleontologist. What’s wrong with that? It’s like inviting a fox to inspect an electric-fence security system for a chicken yard; you know that the fox will advise you to immediately stop wasting electricity on the worthless contraption. Likewise a paleontologist will be totally predictable, regardless of eyewitness evidence that a cryptid is a “living fossil.”

That brings up another similarity between a fox and a paleontologist: They both have to eat. I condemn neither of them for the need to survive. But I must point out that crytozoology is far outside the realm of paleontology, and any apparent or real lack of known fossils in any particular series of strata is not evidence for the non-existence of life. The world of living organisms is far bigger than all the fossils ever found. When paleontologists dismisses a large number of eyewitnesses with insinuations of misidentifications and improper motivations, those paleontologist have gone far outside the special field in when they are experts. They have no more right to ridicule those specific eyewitnesses than a fox has a right to eat chickens in a specific chicken yard.

The paleontologist Glen Kuban has been associated with a mild case of bulverism because of his web page criticizing the concept of modern living pterosaurs. I have known of some non-paleontologists who seem to be trying to defend traditional models of that field by using extreme bulverism. I invite all critics to keep to the issues involved: Avoid personal attacks such as insinuations of lies. Kuban has at least used a number of examples of eyewitness cases, even though he has avoided the more important cases. His portrayal of problems in the objectiveness of investigators or their lack of clear thinking seems to be in the background rather than the foreground, so I classify his page as using mild bulverism.

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Child Care in Long Beach, California

Occasionally I encounter an objection like “if pterosaurs were still living, we would see them flying around.” Several answers pop up, suggesting the critics who ask that kind of question have failed to think deeply about it. The main problem is circular reasoning, for the objection is an attempted refutation of eyewitness sightings: “They could not have seen a living pterosaur because they are no longer living <–> Pterosaurs are no longer living because nobody has seen one.”

Over many years, I have flown from and to airports in many cities. I love to gaze out the window soon after taking off and soon before landing. During all those observations, however, I don’t recall observing any human, not even one, although I look for people. It’s not that humans are extinct; they just have a shape that makes them difficult to see from above (most of them), and few humans spend much time walking near airports.

I’ve lived more than half a century in Southern California, but I have never seen a mountain lion in the wild. It’s not that I’ve never walked through a wilderness area; mountain lions keep hidden, most of the time. But a few Southern Californians do see them.

At the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, in Southern California, near Irvine, in the summer of 2007, a man was driving north from the university, with the ponds on his right. From the marshy area on his left a very strange flying creature flew across the road, right in front of him, flying into the sanctuary. Much has been written about this sighting of an apparent modern pterosaur, but let’s now consider the eyewitness. How difficult it must have been for him to find somebody to talk with about his experience! It was almost a year before he contacted me, and it’s my work (or my pastime, depending on who you ask) to interview eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs.

The point? It’s not that eyewitnesses of apparent modern living pterosaurs are extremely rare; the creatures may be somewhat rare and nocturnal, but eyewitnesses in Western countries may be ridiculed for reporting something we’ve been taught should not exist. Therefore most eyewitnesses keep quiet, as if hiding what they’ve seen by trying to make themselves invisible.

I am grateful for those special persons who have reported their experiences to me, for they have thereby contributed to sharing this wonderful news to the Western world: Pterosaurs live!

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A common objection to the idea of living pterosaurs is simply “they all became extinct millions of years ago.” But why should anyone believe that extinction idea? In Western countries, in particular the United States, universal extinctions of dinosaurs and pterosaurs is drilled into us from kindergarden onwards. No reasons for total extinction are offered, only continuous indoctrination.

We need to listen with open minds to eyewitnesses who have seen creatures that cannot easily be explained as non-pterosaurs. This will eventually free us to discover and classify modern living pterosaurs.

With all the web pages, blogs, and forum postings about possible pterosaurs reported in Papua New Guinea, the United States, and Africa, what about other continents? Well, Europe has its share, although I suspect that several things cause fewer eyewitnesses to share their experiences with me. Let’s consider excerpts from a few reports.

In the Netherlands, about five kilometers northwest of Amsterdam, a number of years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, a featherless creature flew “coming out of the city and flying to a big canal.” The wingspan was estimated at 2 meters; the length, 1.5. The creature “had little hands on the front of his wings, he was dark elephant grey.”

In Spain, “near los desert del palmas,” at a music festival one summer night in 2007, flying about 30-40 feet over the heads of a few music fans at the edge of the festivities, was a creature that had, instead of feathers, the color and apparent texture of suede. The eyewitness saw that it was unlike a bat for it had a long thin tail. He told me, “I haven’t been able to find any species of fruit bat ANYWHERE that has a long, straight tail . . . I’d recognise a fruitbat if I saw one.”

In England, in 1987 or 1988, a ten-year-old girl saw “a glowing object which seemed to open up to what I thought looked like a dragon.” She was shocked and told nobody about it for many years. She told me, “I do still remember what I saw and think that it may have been a pterodactyl that decided to ‘glow.’”

These three eyewitnesses have one thing in common: extreme hesitancy to talk about what they saw. This fear to disclose a sighting may be even greater than a similar fear in the United States.