Pterosaur Week: Quetzalcoatlus.

Sometimes, one wonders why certain dinosaurs get popular and others remain obscure. Tyrannosaurus rex was not the largest carnivorous dinosaur, for example. Pterosaurs also have an excellent example of this in Pteranodon, which was not the largest and not even the most dragonlike of the pterosaurs. It's a fairly simple bat-lizard-bird creature; just about the only outstanding thing outside from the very weird identity of "pterosaur" is the crest, which we will get to in Pteranodon's entry.

To make up for the gross misjudgement of popular culture...this:

That monster of a pterosaur is Quetzalcoatlus. Yes, that name does come from the Aztec serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. This massive flyer was around during the Late Cretaceous, sharing the land and skies with Pteranodon, T-Rex, and Triceratops. Nobody is really sure what it ate, but the current theory is that it behaved much like a stork.

Quetzalcoatlus has one trait that sets it apart from most "standard" pterosaurs - a long, stiff neck made of perfectly circular vertebrae. Attached to this long neck is a head with a long, pointed beak like the head of a spear. This is normal for the group of pterosaurs called azdharchids - literally, pterosaurs named after a Persian dragon. All of them have long, slender necks that make one wonder how they could fly at all. A fair amount of them are also crested. Impressive creatures, in any case.

So a guy, a giraffe, and a stork-lizard walk into a bar.

Azhdarchid pterosaurs, including Quetzalcoatlus, were the largest pterosaurs in existence. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan some 13 meters (~39 feet) across. The beak alone was 8 feet from tip to base. Although Quetzalcoatlus cannot truly claim the title of "biggest," it was pretty impressive. Instead of being compared to other flying birds in size, Quetzy is usually compared to giraffes owing to the long neck and possibly common quadrupedal posture. That's what we're looking at: a giant, flying giraffe that may well have killed things.

We do not know everything about Quetzalcoatlus, however.  We have height and width (including wingspan), but not weight. Most proportions were based off of either extant flying animals (birds, bats) or other pterosaurs (in Quetzy's case, other azhdarchids). This missing data is actually a problem for most pterosaurs, simply because they're so different from any other flying animal, past or present. There are also a few odd azhdarchid pterosaur fossils that may or may not be Quetzalcoatlus, leaving the status of "largest" slightly up for debate. For now, all we can say is "that was one big, alien-looking pterosaur." The largest pterosaur that we can say for sure, in fact.

Source.

Although Pteranodon and the not-pterodactyl remain the most common presentations of pterosaurs in popular media, Quetzalcoatlus has not gone unnoticed. As in the screenshot above, Quetzy remains popular on shows that involve a large variety of prehistoric life. One series gave it ultraviolet vision for a reason that didn't quite make sense. There's a lot of creative potential to be had!

If Pteranodon is popular solely because it's the closest thing we have to a flying dragon, take a look at scale size comparisons of Quetzalcoatlus and a human.If that isn't a wyvern waiting to happen, I don't know what is.

Creature Feature: Leafy Seadragon.

Hah. You thought we were out of weird creatures, didn't you? Nope. Nature never runs out of weirdness. That goes double for the ocean, where, in his city at R'yleh, dread Cthulhu waits dreaming. This creature is not that traumatizing, but it will make you scratch your head a little...if you can find it. MWAHAHA!

This was the best pic I could find that did NOT point the dragon out for you.

The leafy seadragon (Phycodurus eques) is, as looks would suggest, related to seahorses and pipefish. It eats small crustaceans and plankton, usually while staying perfectly still. It is native only to the waters of Southern Australia, where it has a cult following. They have a leafy festival and the seadragon is their official mascot. The whole state loves leafies!



The leafy seadragon is, of course, best known for its insane camouflage. Those fleshy protrusions make it look a lot like seaweed. The photos online do not do this creature's camouflage justice; much of the time, it is a lot harder to pick one out in a bundle of sea plants than one would think. Mind, the camouflage comes with a hefty price: the 'leaves' serve absolutely no other purpose, making the leafy a slow-moving target when it's not in the plants.

From Animalpicturesarchive.

Everything in nature is out to get leafy seadragons. Collectors and practicioners of traditional medicine covet the leafies. They are very slow swimmers, making the babies easy game. Since the leafy's tail is not flexible in the least, they cannot grab onto anything, and many get washed ashore in storms. Pollution is killing off a lot of the sea plants sea dragons use to hide. In other words, this creature has an existence only slightly more credible than that of the panda.

For those of you wanting a pet dragon, good luck. It's possible to get leafy seadragons, but they are often quite expensive. There have been regulations on capturing leafies for ages. Captive stock must be confirmed before purchasing a leafy. Even then, specimens are fragile; only the Tennessee Aquarium has been able to breed them regularly. Better stick with Pokemon's Kingdra unless you have a good amount of cash to blow and a degree in marine biology. (Yes, I know, Kingdra is more like a seahorse in several aspects.)

Myth Week: Dragons.

Let me start by saying one thing: I do not hate dragons. Rather, I hate the bloated, child-friendly monstrosities they have become.  The dragon mythos has been blown so far out of proportion that it's both sad and funny. Instead of being menacing enemies, dragons have become the domesticated dogs of the fantasy industry. Just like how dog people claim that there's a dog for everyone, the fantasy industry churns out dragons so much that there is, in theory, a dragon for everyone. It has become clearer and clearer in modern entertainment that dragons are intended to be super-powered pets.

Case in point.

To put things in perspective: I have asked people to define a dragon. The answers have ranged from "it has horns and wings and flies" to "furry wank." If even the fans cannot properly define a dragon, then who the hell can tell what a dragon is and what it is not?

Enough about the crazy fans. Let's look at all the things that inspired the original dragon stories instead of the modern, fire-breathing pussycats the media have turned them into. That last sentence may have some basis in truth.


Dragons As Snakes. 

The most obvious and widespread inspiration for the dragon is the snake. Although this may sound unbelievable at first, let's play a word game for a little bit. "Wyvern" is derived from "viper." "Zmey" is a feminine form of "zmaj," "snake." Finally, the English word "dragon" looks strikingly similar to the Greek "drakon," a word that means both "dragon" and "snake." Naja are usually depicted as snakes and have etymological similarities dictating such. Orochi, the major Japanese dragon, is "big snake," both literally and physically. Dragon-slaying is not universal. Snake-slaying is.

Dear Apollo: African Rock Pythons are mean, so by all means, kill this one if she bites you.

 

The problem with slaying snakes is that not many of them are very big. Pythons, some boas, and cobras are the only truly giant snakes around. They are naturally exaggerated into big, scary monsters with even more venom, maybe even fire, even though small size and stealth is often what grants REAL snakes success! Christianity took this idea a step further by giving the snake wings, a spaded tail, and talons - kinda like Satan. Not that dragon fans will ever admit that their precious creatures were deliberately designed to look hellish.

Eastern cultures are more accepting of the snake parallel than anyone pushing Western dragons. The Chinese dragon is frequently acknowledged as a composite beast, sometimes of the other 11 Chinese zodiac animals. One Chinese friend on Twitter told me that snakes are seen as "baby dragons." This gels with the Korean imugi perfectly, but I refuse to make another D-War reference here. Instead, there's another take on the Eastern dragon just as interesting as the deal with the serpent.

Dragons As Fish. 

Eastern dragons, and it feels like only Eastern dragons, have deliberate traces of fish in their mythical lineage. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dragons are more associated with water than fire, complete with an abyssal palace of the Dragon God beneath the sea. Every now and then, some of his children wash up upon the beaches...



...or a carp, through its own determination, jumps over the Dragon Gate waterfall and becomes a dragon itself:

 

Eastern cultures are very big on dragons being fish. Fish touted as dragonfish (such as the arowana) are at least lucky and at most magical. Take a look at carp swimming upstream (they must be doing SOMETHING!), an arowana, or a beached oarfish to see where the inspiration came from.

Dragons As Mammals. 

I'll give you a minute to clean up any soda you might have spit out upon reading that. K? Done? All right.

If one buys a book on dragons, one of the most surprising recurring concepts is that dragons are scaly mammals. This is not just Dragonology stuff; one of the most prominent dragon artists in existence, Ciruelo, said the same thing in his own book on dragons.

At first, I thought this was BS as well. Then I realized exactly how much sense it made on a scientific level. Dragons are repeatedly depicted with mammalian traits such as external ears, differentiated teeth, and the vertical limb positioning of a carnivorid. Scales on mammals are totally possible (thanks, pangolin!).

People will usually admit some mammalian traits with Chinese and other Eastern dragons; they are less keen to admit the artistic inspiration for 90% of all Western dragons. Kudos to the Russian zmey; it is one of the few dragons that gets reptilian limb positioning anywhere near right (consistently!). 

This guy and Salamence have a very special bond.

A lot of old art of Western dragons is of a serpentine creature (see blurb 1) traced over a pose common to a mammal or mammal hybrid. The most famous of these is the classic image of Saint George slaying the dragon, which is so blatant a tracing of Bellerophon slaying the chimaera that people might call it plagiarism. Coincidentally, the chimaera one of the mythical creatures in that lore that breathed fire. Fancy that.

Every St. George image ever.

Finally, dragons sport mammalian junk in numerous places. If you consider Mesopotamian Tiamat a dragon (which people seem to, regardless of how gryphonlike she looks), she had "lower parts that jiggle" - either a particularly fat belly or an actual udder. Your modern dragons are castrated. Have fun with that image.

Uncensored for your enjoyment.

They don't look like they move like reptiles at all. If dragons existed, they were even further away from reptiles than dinosaurs and other archosaurs.

Speaking of...


Dragons As Dinosaurs and Other Archosaurs.

Out of all the explanations above, the syncretization of dinosaurs and dragons has survived the test of popular culture. Dinosaurs and dragons are symbolically fused numerous times. Dinosaurs are almost mythical monsters like dragons, only we have skulls to prove they existed.

 

As such, dinosaur and archosaur fossils are sometimes called "dragon bones." It is quite easy to picture an ancient person looking at a T-Rex skull, making up stories about what the creature was like and how he killed it. If you buy that some dinosaurs survived into the modern era, perhaps accounts of dragon-slaying were really dinosaur-slaying!

There are times when this parallel gets...murky, to say the least. In modern media, dragons have started to look like super-dinosaurs, and stylized dinosaurs have started to look like dragons. There are also some rather strange 'dragons' (Lati@s, I'm looking at you) which seem to prey on the flexibility of the word "dragon." The question of "just what IS a dragon, anyways?" is getting harder and harder to answer as it becomes yet another hot-button marketing word.

 

Creature Feature: Hydras.

The hydra is probably Greece's most notorious drakon. She (yes, she; nearly every Greek monster was female) fit the niche of 'impossible-to-kill dragon' very well. Her blood and footsteps were highly toxic. She could regenerate every head except the one immortal head in the center (which is why hydras based off of Greek lore always have an odd number of heads; I have heard anywhere from 3-9 as a starting point). That's right, zombie logic completely fails against this thing. Even Herakles/Hercules struggled with this one.


Greek dragons are JUST SNAKES, people. Also, for some reason, these heads look male.

She is also probably the most botched of any Greek monster; as the name would indicate, a hydra is a waterborne creature. The Greek hydra never breathed fire. Ever.


Is it really THAT much of a bitch to CGI acid instead? Seeing shit corrode can be just as awesome...

She did, however, loan her name to a tiny little cnidarian like so many other badass mythological monsters:



Real hydras are tiny, water-dwelling creatures in the genus Hydra. Hydras can be found in unpolluted, freshwater bodies of water in most temperate and tropical regions.

They are visible to the naked eye and resemble small, not-as-colorful anemones. They spend their entire lives in the sessile polyp stage -that is, they always look like little anemones and spend most of their lives in one spot. Basal disc, tube, tentacles. Simple as that. (Well, OK, do you REALLY want me to get into cellular differentiation specifics, here?)

Like the mythological hydra, these creatures have insane regenerative capabilities. They are just like planaria in that, if cut with a surgical knife or other sharp instrument, the two halves will form two fully functional individual hydras. In less-severe cases, the tissue regenerates whatever is needed. Apt name was apt.



Hydras are also poisonous, albeit not to the degree of their mythological counterpart. Most cnidarians, including corals and jellyfish, have cnidocytes - hooked, venomous cells that paralyze whatever they are about to eat- in their tentacles. Hydras are harmless to humans; jellyfish are another story.

Some types of algae take advantage of the hydra's predatory nature and have formed symbiotic relationships; the hydra gets rid of stuff that would nibble them and the algae provide some supplementary energy.


Not sure if this is algae...but it is pretty.

Hydras never seem to age. Like the immortal jellyfish (another cnidarian), they are considered biologically immortal. All cells continually divide, making them hard to poison as well. If the situation with immortal jellyfish is any indicator, hydras may become capable of world domination.


This is how hydras reproduce. Perfect monster fodder.

They also have some interesting reproductive habits, but compared to ThursSaturday's animal, reproducing asexually and using sex as a last resort is hardly weird.

Creature Feature: The Asian Arowana.

In China, dragons are only associated with snakes in that they share a House in the Chinese zodiac. Otherwise, they are completely different creatures. This is untrue of every other type of dragon; all other dragons derive their names from some word for 'snake.' (This is worth its own essay.) Instead of being menacing fire-breathers like Western dragons, Chinese dragons manipulate water and are revered as gods. Images of dragons are considered lucky, but Chinese dragons are always associated with fish instead of snakes.

Inaccurate on so many levels. Note the spaded tail at one point.

One of the more well-known connections between dragons and fish is the story of the Dragon Gate. If a carp jumps over a certain waterfall, it will become a dragon. One version involves a carp tricking a dragon guarding the gate, then jumping over. However you decide to play it, the theme of a humble fish becoming a dragon is invoked on Boys' Day (in Japan) to ensure that one's son will be successful, just like the carp that jumped the Dragon Gate. (Maybe it flipped the dragon the bird while doing so. Nobody knows.)

They swim upstream like this. All day long.

A number of fish, such as the Asian red arowana (Scleropages formosus), are also draconic by association. There are actually quite a few different localities of arowana in Asia, but this will focus on the 'chili red' sort. As with almost everything else awesome, the red varieties of arowana are all native to Indonesia. These have been so over fished that the species had to be placed on the Endangered list. Its habitat is also being depleted, but the pet trade is far more threatening. People want these fish specifically. The prices for them run into 6 digits.

So, what makes this fish such a big deal? Aren't people content with koi?

...Wow. WOW. THAT is a fish that looks like it could become a dragon at any second! One Asian arowana fan describes the fish as "flying through the water like a dragon flying through the sky." Its regal appearance, large size (around 3 feet; that's not even the family's biggest member!) barbels (whiskers on a fish), and gleaming red scales all make it look like China's favorite legendary creature. No offense to the carp; it's determined, but damn if these red arowana do not look like a step between fish and dragon. HOLY CARP!

There are a number of reasons that people want red arowana, but the main one is that they look like dragons. Other explanations include feng shui (since water is a yin body, a fish with fiery, yang coloration must be added to balance it out), general good luck (which is again linked to the dragon), and fish being able to detect guests with ill will or dying in their masters' steads. Never mind the Chinese Cinderella story that some of us were forced to read for writing classes.

More awesome arowana pictures here. Please support well-meaning farms if you want an arowana; otherwise, you are violating CITES regulations. They also get huge, so be prepared to get a large tank.