My newest book is nearing completion: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. This ebook should be published next month (Sep-2012), with much of the marketing focused on Australian readers. I here include samples, even though the editing is not yet complete.
Some of the sightings mentioned in this book had not been published in any book before, to the best of my knowledge; they are first-hand accounts given to me over several years.
Introduction
. . . I don’t ask that you launch your imagination to fly with each eyewitness report you begin to encounter in the following chapters. When somebody sends me an email about a strange flying creature, I don’t jump onto the first paragraph as if the creature had to have been a living pterosaur; neither do I dismiss the whole account when I first encounter something unexpected. Please do the same: Judge not too quickly, either to one side or the other. . . .
How can pterosaurs be alive? – Chapter One
. . . The first discovery of a pterosaur fossil by a Western scientist, in 1784, was decades before Charles Darwin began writing about his ideas on extinctions and evolution. Before Darwin, Western scientists had assumed that all species of pterosaurs were extinct for a simple reason: Those who discovered the fossils had no experience with any similar animal that was living. . . .
The Finschhafen Pterodactyl – Chapter Two
. . . the two soldiers were fascinated by ants much bigger than those in the States and startled by a wild pig charging through the grass: nothing outlandish. The giant creature that flattened the grass with its wing beats, however—that divided the two soldiers, for Hodgkinson wanted to talk about the “pterodactyl,” but his buddy preferred to pretend they had no encounter. . . .
The Bougainville Creature – Chapter Three
“Thank you, Brian. Your description reminds me of other accounts in the Southwest Pacific. May I ask some questions?”
Q: “Was anything coming out the back of the head (Whether classified as a crest, appendage, horn, or comb)?”
A: “It was like a horn.”
Q: “Can you remember the wing-flapping well enough to estimate the frequency? Thinking of one cycle as the time it takes for the wings to go up and also go down, how many seconds did it take for one cycle (up-and-down-flap)?”
A: “Estimate every 2 seconds.”
Q: “Was the tail straight? (Was any bending of the tail visible?)”
A: “As far as I can recall, straight.”
The Perth Creature – Chapter Six
The creature seen flying over Perth in December of 1997 may not have been the same species as the one seen by Duane Hodgkinson in New Guinea in 1944 or the ones seen by natives on Umboi Island, for the Perth creature seems to have had a short neck. But it appeared to those two Australians as a real living creature . . .
One Reply to “Book About Pterosaurs in Australia”
Comments are closed.