CHAPTER 1

Leathery-Winged Harpies

If TV, film, and overzealous internet users have taughtme anything, it's that the prehistoric world was harshand brutal, and everyday existence was a life-or-deathstruggle. These terrible landscapes would be unrecognizableto our modern eyes, and only the biggest,nastiest animals survived. Consider, for example, thegiant birds that stalked the Earth as recently as twomillion years ago. Taller than basketball players, theykicked and stabbed small, defenseless mammals todeath. The ancestors of our pet cats and dogs wieldedsabre teeth and bone-crushing jaws that they usedto hunt giant elephants and rhinoceros, themselvesarmed with tusks and horns that would shame theirmightiest modern relatives. The world was even moreferocious before these birds and mammals existed.During the span of time known as the Mesozoic (245–65million years ago, or "Ma"), terrible reptiles ruledthe day and predator-prey arms races were more intensethan the Cold War. Gangs of carnivorous dinosaursattacked their enormous herbivorous relatives,contesting their switchblade claws and armor-piercingteeth against the spikes, clubs, shields, and armoredhides of their quarry. The Mesozoic oceans were justas deadly, teeming with giant, snaggle-toothed marinereptiles that render Moby Dick as intimidating as Flipper.Even the planet itself had a bad attitude in thisAge of Reptiles. Angry volcanoes perpetually smoked,continents ripped themselves to pieces, and giganticmeteorites collided with the Earth, thowing enoughdust and ash into the skies to block out the sun andcause cataclysmic extinction events.

The skies of this terrible age were no less formidable.They were dominated by a group of lanky grotesques,strange hybrids of birds and bats with a decidedly reptilianflavor. Their oversize heads were bristling withferocious teeth or else bore savage beaks, each usedto spear fish from primordial seas. Their outstretchedmembranous wings attained dimensions rivalingthe wingspans of small aircraft, but were supportedby lank, undermuscled limbs and tiny bodies. Theywere weak, flimsy, and pathetic animals, barely ableto power their own locomotion and reliant on cliffsand headwinds to achieve flight. They were virtuallyhelpless when grounded, barely able to push or dragthemselves about, and completely at the mercy of anycarnivorous reptile that fancied chewing on their hollow,twiglet-like bones. These creaky beasts were anarchaic first attempt by vertebrate animals to achieveflight before graceful birds and nimble bats inheritedthe skies later in Earth's history. Given their obviousphysical ineptitude, it's hardly surprising these creatures,the pterosaurs, collectively bought the farm atthe end of the Mesozoic, along with any dinosaur thatwas not lucky enough to have evolved into a bird.

But That's All Hokum

Of course, the world and animals described aboveare nothing but caricatures of reality, the sort of landscapeyou may expect to find in Arthur Conan Doyle'sThe Lost World or similar-grade fiction. The popularview of primordial Earth as violent and totally unfamiliaris probably entirely untrue, a construct of poorscientific communication, overdramatic media representation,and romantic storytellers. In reality, ancientanimals were no less sophisticated or intelligent, normore freakish and savage, than those alive today. Paleontologicalresearch has probed deeply into the exoticand strange natures of many ancient animals to revealthat they merely represent "extreme" variants of anatomiesand behaviors we see in our modern, familiarspecies. Such research has not made animals like thelong-necked sauropods or giant theropod dinosaursany less spectacular, but they are certainly not as mysteriousand enigmatic as they once were.

Pterosaurs, which translates from Greek to"winged lizards," have suffered more than most intheir depiction as ancient savages. All that remainsof these animals are their fossil bones, oddly proportionedskeletons that have proved difficult to comprehendand continue to cause frequent controversiesamong those who study them. The pterosaur'sability to fly, combined with bizarre anatomy, oftengigantic size, and an old-fashioned attitude thatextinct animals were inherently inferior to modernspecies,...