Pterodactyl Quotes

Luke used to give me butterflies. Noah spawned mutant pterodactyls.

Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.

She wished, as almost all kids wish at one point or another, that she could turn into a pterodactyl and fly away and never come back.

I'll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.' We don't have pigeons.' Then I'll feed the pterodactyls.

I'm not your girl" "You could be." "Yeah and I could also tattoo an anorexic pterodactyl on my navel, but I'm not planning on do that, either

I am the dinosaur of love. Specifically, I am a pterodactyl, and you are my silent “p.” Stay quiet woman!

I agreed. By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood. The only problem now was a gigantic neon sign outside the window, blocking our view of the mountains -- millions of colored balls running around a very complicated track, strange symbols & filigree, giving off a loud hum.... "Look outside," I said. "Why?" "There's a big ... machine in the sky, ... some kind of electric snake ... coming straight at us." "Shoot it," said my attorney. "Not yet," I said. "I want to study its habits.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

you will probably be eaten by either wild boar, coyotes, or at the very least these fucking annoying pterodactyl mosquitoes.

Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djan karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us. "Eidolons" (1988)

As i crawled up the bed to sit beside him, my pterodactyl butterflies somersaulted in my stomach. Good God, he was gorgeous and i was in bed with him.

The pterodactyl and the brontosaurus were locked in mortal combat on the cliff over the Lost Continent.

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved. Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. “Make it stop,” he said. Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe. The ragged sound cut through the apartment again. “What fresh hell is this?” Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air. Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape. “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand. “I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.” Ronan shrugged. “Perhaps for you.” “Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?” In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again—a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex. “Well, this is not going to do,” he said. “You’re going to have to make it stop.” “She has to be fed,” Ronan replied. The ravel gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. “It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks.” “Can’t you keep her downstairs?” In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. “You tell me.

Having nothing left to fidget with, i rested against the counter and tried not to stare at Noah. But i wanted to. He had his jacket off and his black t-shirt fit him perfectly. Today, during lunch, Grace had tunred her nose up when she spotted the bottom of his tattoo on his right bicep. I'd silently agreed with Lila's comment-yum. My inides had melted when Noah produced his wicked grinand gazed at me like i was naked. Luke used to give me butterflies. Noah spawned mutant pterodactyls.

Yes. No. Hang on. So what were these people? And pterodactyls have been extinct for fifty million years.” “If you say so, dear. Your father never really talked about it.

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of...landing strip? I crouch down for a better look. Oh. My. God. Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad–triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other–protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow.

Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked Godzilla porn.

SUMMER DEEP" "Summer deep is in the hills again His lady is a lioness Winds of birds blow through the fields again Invaders from the true worlds A coat of grapes is on my back again I ride upon my zebra Pterodactyl beak hat on my brow The truth is like a stranger Be like you could All my friends say.

Noah didn’t walk, he stalked and I loved the mischievous glint in his eye when he stalked me. He placed his hands on my hips and nuzzled my hair. “I love the way you smell.” I swallowed and tried to reign in the mutant pterodactyls having a roller derby in my stomach as I dared to think about a future for the two of us. The moment Aires’ car rumbled beneath me, I’d known that I needed Noah in my life. Aires’ death had left a gaping hole in my heart. I thought all I needed was that car to run. Wrong. A car would never fill the emptiness, but love could. “I hope your future includes me. I mean, someone has to continue to kick your butt in pool.” Noah laughed as he snagged his fingers around my belt loops and dragged me closer. “I was letting you win.” “Please.” His eyes had about fallen out of his head when I’d sunk a couple of balls off the break. “You were losing. Badly.” I wondered if he also reveled in the warmth of being this close again. “Then I guess I’ll have to keep you around. For good. You’ll be useful during a hustle.” He lowered his forehead to mine and his brown eyes, which had been laughing seconds ago, darkened as he got serious. “I have a lot I want to say to you. A lot I want to apologize for.” “Me, too.” And I touched his cheek again, this time letting my fingers take their time. Noah wanted me, for good. “But can we hash it all out some other time? I’m sort of talked out and I’ve still gotta go see my dad. Do you think we can just take it on faith right now that I want you, you want me, and we’ll figure out the happy ending part later?” His lips curved into a sexy smile and I became lost in him. “I love you, Echo Emerson.” I whispered the words as he brought his lips to mine. “Forever.

The dragon is a more enduring animal than the pterodactyl. I have never yet met anyone who really believed in a pterodactyl; but every honest person believes in dragons -- down in the back kitchen of his consciousness.

Dyes made from coal. The tarpits in Los Angeles… ONE OF OUR ANCHOR POINTS A COLONY IN YR DAY STILL A HUB OF POWERFUL ILLUSIONS & SO THE LEGEND OF THE CENTAUR IS THE LAST POETRY OF ATLANTIS Dinosaur, pterodactyl, bat—good Lord!

Music eliminates my gravity. When I'm singing, I'm a ravenous pterodactyl. I'm alive and free and hungry, and I know who I am. But the flood is coming; it's weighing me down, making me prisoner to my loneliness and pain. -character Joanna (Broken)

It was a terrible mistake to say this. She got to screaming at me then. She'd scream like a great bird sometimes. She'd grow wings and fly around the house screaming. It was really awful. It was like arguing with a pterodactyl. You could do nothing.

I look over at the man in question and just the sight of him gives me butterflies.  No, not butterflies.  Butterflies don’t quite do the trembling in my gut justice.  These are freaking pterodactyls!!  Huge, bird-like creatures are flapping around in my stomach just by looking at him. 

Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The pirates sale around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell.

Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we choose to ascribe meaning to. School cafeteria out of your favorite pastry today? It must be because the universe is trying to keep you on your diet.. Thanks, Universe! You missed your train? Maybe the train’s going to explode in the tunnel, or Patient Zero for some horrible bird flu (waterfowl, goose, pterodactyl) is on that train, and thanks goodness you weren’t on it after all. Thanks, Universe! No one bothers to follow up with destiny, though. The cafeteria just forgot there was another bow in the back, and you got a slice of cake from your friend anyway. You fumed while waiting for another train, but one came along eventually. No one died on the train you missed. No one so much as sneezed. We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we’re just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don’t mean anything.

Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome's happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk.

It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls.

According to the Book, they had once been equipped with wings of their own, but evolution had stripped them of this power. All but the sprites. One school of thought believed that the People were descended from airborne dinosaurs. Possibly pterodactyls. Much of the upper-body skeletal structure was the same. This theory would certainly explain the tiny nub of bone on each shoulder blade.

Words are taking their revenge. One day, they break the seals of the phylacteries, and come swarming out like snakes. Another day, they spurt from the labels of the bottles that had held them prisoner, and spread through the black sky with their pterodactyl-like jaws thrust forward like a saw-blade knife. They sweep straight ahead, and as they kill their masters their cries of vengeance can be heard.

Once I mentioned Alessandro, the family had ganged up on me. Arabella screamed like a pterodactyl and demanded to know where Alessandro was staying, while punching her palm with her fist. Bern swore, which had happened exactly six times since he came to live with us. Grandma Frida promised to hit Alessandro with a wrench when he came over. Leon produced a gun, and then Mom asked him what the rule was about guns at the dinner table, and then he said that this was a special case and he had a bullet with Alessandro’s name on it. Then she told him that writing names on bullets was no way to go through life.

What fresh hell is this?” Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air. Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape. “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand. “I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.” Ronan shrugged. “Perhaps for you.” “Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?

They arrived to find the park was a train wreck. Literally; that was the theme of this year’s decorations, a locomotive accident with hundreds of gruesome fatalities. A line of smashed, overturned, and burning train cars—real ones, brought over from an abandoned rail yard—snaked through the park, partygoers shuffling around and climbing over them. Unsettlingly realistic corpses and severed limbs littered the ground. Massive zombie buzzards the size of pterodactyls swarmed overhead and occasionally swooped down on tattered leathery wings, snatching up some body part in a jagged beak and hauling it back into the sky. Again: Devil’s Night was not for kids.

Time does not exist for the island that the conquerors missed. If you walk the wrong way around the island quickly enough, time will turn backwards. But I could never make it. At a brisk pace, the frail bones of my shins would pinch; my body was not meant to move that way. Whenever I made it past the needle rock, the one at the top of the island’s strange hill, I would collapse. My ruined body crumpled in the ancient grass, the damp, salty air stinging my cheeks and lips, tasting of forgotten sea shanties sung by dead sailors whose bodies sink, still, somewhere, not too far from here. Today, I meandered across the rocks and craggy cliffs, passing the home of the prehistoric petrel, whose beak is hooked like the pterodactyl’s; the albatross, wider than waves; the mischievous skua, claiming the carcasses of her siblings from the sand. When summer returns, the king penguins will roar back, covering the beach like burnt breadcrumbs under melted butter. Today, like every day, I found myself drawn to the sand. I sat. I waited. I watched the waves and listened to the language of the sea. What else was there to do when my tasks were complete? Beneath that chorus was the dull ringing of windchimes, mildly muffled by the bellow of waves assaulting the sand. I noticed how long it had been since I’d noticed that eldritch melody. The routine fractured. I saw something far out in the water.

The wars break out and die down, but then there’s a flareup elsewhere. Houses cracked open like eggs, their contents torched or stolen or stomped vindictively underfoot; refugees strafed from airplanes. In a million cellars the bewildered royal family faces the firing squad; the gems sewn into their corsets will not save them. Herod’s troops patrol a thousand streets; just next door, Napoleon makes off with the silverware. In the wake of the invasion, any invasion, the ditches fill up with raped women. To be fair, raped men as well. Raped children, raped dogs and cats. Things can get out of control. But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we’ve had enough of it we turn it off. So much for the twentieth century, we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there’s a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twentyfirst century, sweeping overhead like a spaceship filled with ruthless lizard-eyed aliens or a metal pterodactyl. Sooner or later it will sniff us out, it will tear the roofs off our flimsy little burrows with its iron claws, and then we will be just as naked and shivering and starving and diseased and hopeless as the rest. Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say, The end of the world is at hand. You lie to yourself – I’m glad I won’t be around to see it – when in fact you’d like nothing better, as long as you can watch it through the little secret window, as long as you won’t be involved. But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown. What happened next? For a moment I’ve lost the thread, it’s hard for me to remember, but then I do. It was the war, of course. We weren’t prepared for it, but at the same time we knew we’d been there before. It was the same chill, the chill that rolled in like a fog, the chill into which I was born.

Belgium,” said the girl, “I hardly like to say it.” “Belgium?” exclaimed Arthur. A drunken seven-toed sloth staggered past, gawked at the word and threw itself backward at a blurry-eyed pterodactyl, roaring with displeasure. “Are we talking,” said Arthur, “about the very flat country, with all the EEC and the fog?” “What?” said the girl. “Belgium,” said Arthur. “Raaaaaarrrchchchchch!” screeched the pterodactyl. “Grrruuuuuurrrghhhh,” agreed the seven-toed sloth. “They must be thinking of Ostend Hoverport,” muttered Arthur. He turned back to the girl. “Have you ever been to Belgium in fact?” he asked brightly and she nearly hit him. “I think,” she said, restraining herself, “that you should restrict that sort of remark to something artistic.” “You sound as if I just said something unspeakably rude.” “You did.” In today’s modern Galaxy there is of course very little still held to be unspeakable. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality. So, for instance, when in a recent national speech the Financial Minister of the Royal World Estate of Quarlvista actually dared to say that due to one thing and another and the fact that no one had made any food for a while and the king seemed to have died and most of the population had been on holiday now for over three years, the economy was now in what he called “one whole joojooflop situation,” everyone was so pleased that he felt able to come out and say it that they quite failed to note that their entire five-thousand-year-old civilization had just collapsed overnight. But even though words like “joojooflop,” “swut,” and “turlingdrome” are now perfectly acceptable in common usage there is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the Galaxy except for use in Serious Screenplays. There is also, or was, one planet where they didn’t know what it meant, the stupid turlingdromes. —

Every morning and evening at Lakefield, the fruit bats would come and go from the trees near our campsite. During the day, you could hear them in the distance as they squabbled over territory. Each fruit bat wanted to jockey for the best position on a branch. But when evening came, as if by silent agreement, all the bats knew to fly off at the same time. Steve grabbed me and the kids one evening just at dusk, and we went out into the river to watch the bats. I would rank that night as one of the most incredible experiences of my life, right up there with catching crocs and swimming with manatees. Sitting at dusk with the kids in the boat, all of a sudden the trees came alive. The bats took flight, skimming over the water to delicately dip for a drink, flying directly over our heads. It was as if we had gone back in time and pterodactyls flew once again. It was such an awe-inspiring event that we all fell quiet, the children included. The water was absolutely still, like an inky mirror, almost like oil. Not a single fish jumped, not a croc moved. All we heard were the wings of these ancient mammals in the darkening sky. We lay quietly in the bottom of the boat, floating in the middle of this paradise. We knew that we were completely and totally safe. We were in a small dinghy in the middle of some of the most prolifically populated crocodile water, yet we were absolutely comfortable knowing that Steve was there with us. “One day, babe,” Steve said softly to me, “we’ll look back on wildlife harvesting projects and things like croc farming the same way we look back on slavery and cannibalism. It will be simply an unbelievable part of human history. We’ll get so beyond it that it will be something we will never, ever return to.” “We aren’t there yet,” I said. He sighed. “No, we aren’t.” I thought of the sign Steve had over his desk back home. It bore the word “warrior” and its definition: “One who is engaged in battle.” And it was a battle. It was a battle to protect fragile ecosystems like Lakefield from the wildlife perpetrators, from people who sought to kill anything that could turn a profit. These same people were out collecting croc eggs and safari-hunting crocodiles. They were working to legalize a whole host of illicit and destructive activities. They were lobbying to farm or export everything that moved, from these beautiful fruit bats we were watching, to magpie geese, turtles, and even whales.

Every morning and evening at Lakefield, the fruit bats would come and go from the trees near our campsite. During the day, you could hear them in the distance as they squabbled over territory. Each fruit bat wanted to jockey for the best position on a branch. But when evening came, as if by silent agreement, all the bats knew to fly off at the same time. Steve grabbed me and the kids one evening just at dusk, and we went out into the river to watch the bats. I would rank that night as one of the most incredible experiences of my life, right up there with catching crocs and swimming with manatees. Sitting at dusk with the kids in the boat, all of a sudden the trees came alive. The bats took flight, skimming over the water to delicately dip for a drink, flying directly over our heads. It was as if we had gone back in time and pterodactyls flew once again. It was such an awe-inspiring event that we all fell quiet, the children included. The water was absolutely still, like an inky mirror, almost like oil. Not a single fish jumped, not a croc moved. All we heard were the wings of these ancient mammals in the darkening sky. We lay quietly in the bottom of the boat, floating in the middle of this paradise. We knew that we were completely and totally safe. We were in a small dinghy in the middle of some of the most prolifically populated crocodile water, yet we were absolutely comfortable knowing that Steve was there with us.

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning ‘wing-fingered.

swatted away yet another mosquito disguised as a pterodactyl.

I swatted away yet another mosquito disguised as a pterodactyl.

So, in other words, crocodiles, komodo dragons, alligators, and so on, are not technically dinosaurs since their hip structures have their legs coming out to the side, which causes their belly to naturally rest on the ground. This also means flying reptiles like pterodactyls, and water reptiles like plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs either. Simply put: all dinosaurs are dragons, but not all dragons are dinosaurs.

The Hebrew word owph, that we normally translate as “bird” in Genesis 1 and Genesis 7, means creatures with wings. This obviously includes birds (the predominant type here) but also other winged creatures — such as bats, flightless birds, flying reptiles, etc. For example, ostriches and bats are included under this word owph in Leviticus 11. Most commentators recognize that Genesis 7:3 (see above), “seven each of the birds of the air,” is tied to the backdrop of clean creatures in Genesis 7:2 (see above). Verse 2 lists all animals coming onboard the ark in two categories — clean and unclean — and how many of each. When verse 3 immediately after that lists 7, it is discussing a subgroup of the clean animals, otherwise, verse 2 is in error. However, contextually, this doesn’t mean all winged/flying creatures came by 7 but instead limited to 7 of the clean ones. Pteranodons and pterodactyls are not among the clean creatures defined per the Bible (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14). For instance, Leupold writes: In v. 3 the idea of “the birds of the heavens” must, of course, be supplemented by the adjective “clean,” according to the principle laid down in v. 2.24 Likewise, Dr. John Gill, who agrees when discussing the birds, writes: That is, of such as were clean; seven couple of these were to be brought into the ark, for the like use as of the clean beasts, and those under the law.

Jenny stiffened. “Nothing’s wrong.” There was a sharpness, a tone I had never heard her use before. It hurt having it directed at me, the edges of those two words cutting, making it hard for me to swallow. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll go.” “Wait.” She grabbed my wrist before I could turn. “I’m sorry. I’m not mad at you.” “It’s okay,” I said. Words were funny like that. One moment they could wound you, turn into bricks that would sink to the bottom of your stomach. The next moment those bricks were transforming into butterflies, eagles, pterodactyls, Frisbees, various flying objects rising to your chest and nesting in the spaces between your ribs. I smiled at her, relieved that we were all good.

No one described the mix of sublime and mundane better than the Republican senator from Kansas, John Ingalls. In an era when man’s conquest of nature was proceeding in an uninterrupted stampede, when the wonders of evolution and the fate of dinosaurs were occupying the salon dreams of the educated and the elite, Ingalls let loose a rhetorical fancy that almost flew away from him in a flurry of flowery verbiage. Government circa 1880, he remarked, “can properly be regarded as in the transition epoch and characterized as a pterodactyl.… It is, like that animal, equally adapted to the waddling and dabbling in the slime and mud of partisan politics, and soaring aloft with discordant cries into the glittering and opalescent empyrean of civil service reform.

pterodactyl,

Those little fuckers won’t get within pterodactyl-farting distance of you, I promise.

It was bizarre. Not at all like the soft and gentle flapping of butterflies' wings people spoke of- no, no, no. More like pterodactyls swooping and clipping her heart with every pass. Actually, maybe bizarre was the wrong word. Terrifying was more like it.

structure has been defined as ‘any assemblage of materials which is intended to sustain loads’, and the study of structures is one of the traditional branches of science. If an engineering structure breaks, people are likely to get killed, and so engineers do well to investigate the behaviour of structures with circumspection. But, unfortunately, when they come to tell other people about their subject, something goes badly wrong, for they talk in a strange language, and some of us are left with the conviction that the study of structures and the way in which they carry loads is incomprehensible, irrelevant and very boring indeed. Yet structures are involved in our lives in so many ways that we cannot really afford to ignore them: after all, every plant and animal and nearly all of the works of man have to sustain greater or less mechanical forces without breaking, and so practically everything is a structure of one kind or another. When we talk about structures we shall have to ask, not only why buildings and bridges fall down and why machinery and aeroplanes sometimes break, but also how worms came to be the shape they are and why a bat can fly into a rose-bush without tearing its wings. How do our tendons work? Why do we get ‘lumbago’? How were pterodactyls able to weigh so little? Why do birds have feathers? How do our arteries work? What can we do for crippled children? Why are sailing ships rigged in the way they are? Why did the bow of Odysseus have to be so hard to string? Why did the ancients take the wheels off their chariots at night? How did a Greek catapult work? Why is a reed shaken by the wind and why is the Parthenon so beautiful? Can engineers learn from natural structures? What can doctors and biologists and artists and archaeologists learn from engineers? As it has turned out, the struggle

Instantly, I dropped my arms down to my side and stood straight. I know it was an insult, but I hardly noticed since I was thinking of how awesome a pterodactyl cop would be.

Arabella screamed like a pterodactyl and demanded to know where Alessandro was staying, while punching her palm with her fist. Bern swore, which had happened exactly six times since he came to live with us. Grandma Frida promised to hit Alessandro with a wrench when he came over. Leon produced a gun, and then Mom asked him what the rule was about guns at the dinner table, and then he said that this was a special case and he had a bullet with Alessandro’s name on it. Then she told him that writing names on bullets was no way to go through life.

Dinos vs Elves’, which was splayed across the cover of what was clearly a children's book depicting an Elf being bitten in half by a pterodactyl.

We bumped into each other at a sex party. I panicked and ran away but got intercepted in the street by robbers. Davidson shifted, took them out, and flew me here. I thought I’d been kidnapped by a pterodactyl. Do you want coffee? Something to eat? You must be hungry.

Without doubt the Pterodactyl attracted great attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him. And so it turned out. Also the makings of a mammal, in time. One thing we have to say to his credit, that in the matter of picturesqueness he was the triumph of his Period; he wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy and wonderful mixture altogether , a kind of long-distance premonitory symptom of Kipling’s marine: ’E isn’t one o’ the reg’lar Line, nor ’e isn’t one of the crew, ’E’s a kind of a giddy harumfrodite – soldier an’ sailor too! Alfred Russel Wallace

DINOSAUR Large reptilian creatures that come in a variety of species (T. rexes, triceratops, stegosaurs, pterodactyls, raptors—to name a few), with one noticeable commonality between them: They’re all covered in bright, fluffy feathers.

Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom? Because it has a silent pee.

Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The pirates sale around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell.

With me is a glorious assortment of people – druids, women in flower crowns, a man wearing only a tank top with blue paint smeared across his body, someone dressed as a pterodactyl. For some, this is one of the most important days on their religious calendar, for others it’s a bit of early morning Christmas fun.

Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl when he goes to the bathroom?

pterodactyls

Now, listen. I know there are those of you out there who are screaming, “That’s not a fire pterodactyl, you dummy! That’s a dragon!” If that’s you, I have two things to tell you: 1. You are a nerd. 2. It was definitely a pterodactyl that breathed fire. I know those never existed, but that’s what it was. I saw it. I was there. You were not. Zip it.