East Coast sightings of a “pterodactyl” or flying dinosaur (meaning a pterosaur) have ranged from New England down to Florida, with no indication of any geographic restriction. Perhaps the best publicized has been the sighting by Susan Wooten in South Carolina, but there have been others equaling amazing.
It flew directly over us, about twenty yards above us . . . it perched on a tree about fifty yards past us. . . . This [pterosaur] had a pterodactyl protruded head and a rhamphorhynchoid diamond-tipped tail . . . wing-tip to wing-tip, about 12+ feet? I don’t even know if I’m close. And the length, I’d estimate about 10 feet?”
Nocturnal Pterosaur in Florida
According to the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America, a man in Florida saw, in 2008, at about 2:30 a.m., two small pterosaurs flying over houses in the neighborhood. The man’s friend also saw the creatures that had no feathers, a pointed beak, and a “long pointed thing protruding from the back of its head.”
I recently interviewed a man who was informed of a sighting of a live pterosaur on Long Island, New York . . . The creature was referred to in terms like “dinosaur-flying-reptile.” The sighting was at a long stretch of beach, perhaps Lido Beach, on Long Island. A number of eyewitnesses saw it soaring above the beach, and one or more observers tried to take photos of it. People thought, at first, that it might be a kite, but it soon became apparent that it was not moving like a kite, and it had no string attached. The creature’s wingspan, tip-to-tip, was around seven to ten feet. The head had a long beak and something “pointy” at the back of the head.
South Carolina Pterosaur (not the Wooten sighting)
In this newly reported account, there were many eyewitness, at least four or five; it was at a soccer camp in Clinton, South Carolina, around 1994.
It was huge, as big as a plane, and looked very similar to the sketch created by Susan Wooten on your website. . . . I saw a huge pterodactyl looking creature, flying very high in the sky. The strangest thing about the sighting was how slow the wings were flapping and how high it was flying. Several parents who were watching the scrimmages and some of the other players on the sidelines saw the creature too. . . . I remember shouting “that was a pterodactyl!”, but everyone else [around me] that saw it, seemed to shrug it off in disbelief.
The “flying dinosaur” of Papua New Guinea is often called “ropen.” It seems to be a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur of immense size, far larger than any of the fossils of Rhamphorhynchoids known, at least into the early 21st century. The wingspan can be as big as 25+ feet; the tail length can be 12+ feet.