Vampire Pterodactyl Conjecture

My recent post on Monday on the possibilityof a vampire pterodactyl was unexpected and I actually resisted the idea forsome time.  After all, the pterodactylwas always shown with a long jaw to hunt fish and a long crest to produce adistinctive silhouette that everyone recognizes.  Take away all that and we have a silhouettethat is very easy to mistake for an obscured image of a large raptor.  Thus even when I had read several quiteseparate reports including a couple that pretty well made the case, the flyingreptile was still hard to accept.

Readers of my blog also know thathumanity is unable to accept that a whole range of creatures operateexclusively at night and rarely intersect our own natural niche.  We have been digging up a veritablemenagerie.    That characteristic allowseven large animals, or perhaps especially allows large animals to evadeobservation or capture.  The smaller onesdo run the real risk of simply been caught by a vehicle and run down and arethusly recovered.

A large creature, even on footcan be six miles away inside one hour even at our speed.  All night and it is thirty miles away insidean area of three thousand square miles. Ten thousand soldiers in hot pursuit would still lose such acreature.  A large creature that is ableto fly at seventy miles per hour and that is by gliding which costs littleenergy can bury itself in a million square miles.

We can assume though that we aredealing with a fair number of creatures although there is much that needs to bethought out.  A large number of downedcattle could easily be the handiwork of a single band ranging over severalstates.  At this point we simply do notknow their real needs.

We also have cattle numbers thatseem exaggerated and we need to pin down trustworthy numbers.  Ten thousand in ten years or a thousand peryear is a rate of several feedings per night by plausibly a couple of creaturesat least.  Taken from that perspective,we are looking for a score of marauding bands who may feed every several daysor perhaps rarer still.  It is nothundreds and that means that they are simply few enough to produce exactly whatwe have in terms of sightings which are rare and ambiguous.

Importantly, however such a scoreof creatures could all originate from one rookery in the South West or even Mexico and simply spread out all over the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands in a few days ofwandering from roost to roost hundreds of miles apart.

We have applied labels including Chupacabraand Mothman and plausibly Thunder bird from the times of the great buffaloherds.

Whatever they turn out to be, itis clear that they have returned to North Americaaround forty years ago, likely in response to recovering populations decimatedperhaps after the advent of the Europeans in the nineteenth century.