United States or Ghana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Here," said he, pointing to the picture of an extraordinary flying monster, "is an excellent reproduction of the dimorphodon, or pterodactyl, a flying reptile of the Jurassic period. On the next page is a diagram of the mechanism of its wing. Kindly compare it with the specimen in your hand." A wave of amazement passed over me as I looked. I was convinced. There could be no getting away from it.
Searchlights mounted at advantageous points threw their narrow pencils of light into the skies. The people in different sections of the city caught a fleeting glance of a huge airship that floated sullenly along, like some bird of prey from out of the past a new pterodactyl that instead of seizing its victims dropped death upon them. One shell fell in Trafalgar Square.
Thus the chalk contains remains of those strange flying and swimming reptiles, the pterodactyl, the ichthyosaurus, and the plesiosaurus, which are found in no later deposits, but abounded in preceding ages. The chambered shells called ammonites and belemnites, which are so characteristic of the period preceding the cretaceous, in like manner die with it.
Some have supposed that a late, lingering individual may have suggested the idea of the fabulous dragon an idea which seems to be in the minds of nearly all the human race, for in the early records of many nations we find the destruction of dragons assigned to their gods and heroes. The figure of the pterodactyl represents pretty closely that which is given to the dragons.
If you intend to show your puppies, you should begin some time in advance to school them to walk on the lead and to stand quiet when ordered to. During the past five-and-twenty years the names of two particular Dachshunds stand out head and shoulders above those of their competitors: Champions Jackdaw and Pterodactyl.
How is it that this bearded patriarch, who now poses as the only original Adam, has never been able, with any degree of positiveness, to answer the question as to whether or not he was provided with a caudal appendage a question which I am prepared to answer definitely, at any moment, if called upon by the proper authorities, and, if need be, to produce not only the tail itself, but the fierce and untamed pterodactyl that bit it off upon that unfortunate autumn afternoon when he and I had our first and last conflict.
The trouble was a harpy a thing about the size and general design of a Terran Jurassic pterodactyl, big enough to take a Little Fuzzy at one mouthful. It must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling back for another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward loop and dropped like a stone.
Ararat, a muddy pyramid dotted here and there with olive trees curious, by the way, to find olives so high! in the receding waters the vagrant raven cheerfully picking out the eye of a defunct pterodactyl.
"Are you not glad to see me?" She looked straight into my eyes. "I hate you," she said, and then, as I was about to beg for a fair hearing she pointed over my shoulder. "The thipdar comes," she said, and I turned again to meet the reptile. So this was a thipdar. I might have known it. The cruel bloodhound of the Mahars. The long-extinct pterodactyl of the outer world.
Then the candidate was badgered about the pterodactyl, and concerning the difference in anatomy between a bat and a bird, and about the lamprey, and the cartilaginous fishes, and the amphioxus. All these questions he answered more or less to the satisfaction of the examiners generally less.
Word Of The Day