In the Sesame Street song “I’d Like to Visit the Moon,” sung by Ernie, what do we hear about dinosaurs? “I’d like to . . . go back in time and meet a dinosaur.” In Western society, at least in my experience in American culture, universal-dinosaur-extinction indoctrination seeps into many aspects of our lives, flooding us from all directions, beginning in early childhood. How does that relate to modern pterosaurs? Most of us have tied pterosaurs to dinosaurs, as if they were two versions of the same thing: “prehistoric” animals.
I do not mean to imply that no species of dinosaur or pterosaur has become extinct. If they were now as common as they once were, without any extinctions at any time, this world would be a different place indeed: not so safe a place for humans. But there is a world of different between the extinction of a species and the extinction of a general type.
From the third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America
Regarding the 1944 sighting of a “pterodactyl” near Finschhafen, New Guinea:
Both Americans, before their experience, assumed universal pterosaur extinction, but the biology student apparently held it dogmatically. That soldier was probably so firmly entrenched in the extinction dogma, so rigidly trained to obey its command, that he rebelled against his personal experience with a giant Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur. It was Hodgkinson who accepted the truth of what both of them experienced. . . .
Where did we get the idea of pterosaur extinction? Early discoverers of pterosaur fossils had no knowledge of living pterosaurs; they assumed they were looking at the remains of extinct creatures, and that assumption has been magnified for two centuries. I believe that the idea was cemented into Western thought when Darwin’s General Theory of Evolution became popular in the nineteenth century, but search textbooks in vain for solid scientific evidence of pterosaur extinction, for the conjecture itself is more philosophical than scientific. It is an assumption.
Around 1965, young Patty Carson, daughter of the commander of the Guantanamo base in Cuba, was walking home one day. She and her little brother were shocked to see a large winged creature pop up its head and upper body above the nearby tall grass. Patty knew what she saw flying away that day, but she was not believed by her parents.