The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Reptiles in the sky
Museum’s ‘Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs’ illustrates what they were — and were not
After walking through “Sailing for Science: The Voyage of the Blossom” — a historical exhibit in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s central Fawick Gallery — you arrive at Kahn Hall, where something shiny and new but dealing with a topic much older than a nearly century-old ship’s voyage awaits.
Kahn Hall is the temporary home of “Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs,” a very-modern traveling exhibit created by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Early on, you may learn just how mistaken you are about what you may have considered flying dinosaurs. “The big takeaway message from this exhibit is that pterosaurs were a very diverse group of animals,” says Amanda McGee, CMNH collections manager, vertebrate paleontology.
“They lived during the Mesozoic (Era), the same time as the dinosaurs, but there’s a misconception that they are flying dinosaurs, and they’re not. They’re a separate group of reptiles. They were the first vertebrates to take to the sky.”
(It gets more confusing when you consider that today’s birds are more like dinosaurs and in fact are considered to be descendants of them.)
And there’s more to this variety of being misinformed.
“If (people) think of these guys, they will refer to them as pterodactyls, not pterosaurs, and pterodactyl is not a scientific term,” McGee says. “The very first pterosaur was from a genus called pterodactylus, and because it was one of the first described, everyone jumped on that term, but it’s really just that one genus of pterosaurs.”
As you enter the exhibition, you come to a small case with casts of fossils from the CMNH collection, and then to an introductory video.
There is a lot more video beyond that to attract young visitors. On a recent Monday morning, groups of children were eagerly taking part in interactive video stations where they could do things such as flapping their arms to keep a virtual pterosaur in flight.
However, there is also simple ol’ fossil specimens and re-creations to intrigue the more scienceminded.
“Their fossils are also really rare compared with the dinosaurs,” McGee says.
“Because they fly, their bones are really delicate — they’re actually hollow, similar to birds — so the likelihood of them being preserved is really low. The fact that we have any pterosaur fossils at all is pretty amazing.”
In fact, her favorite station is called “Fabulous Fossil,” containing a significant portion of a 110 million-year-old creature.
It’s basically a 3-D preservation of a pterosaur, which is just unheard of. It blew my mind when I saw it.”
“Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs” has information to impart on what these reptiles ate, how various species handled being on land and the great range in their sizes. Some were the size of a sparrow, McGee says, but guests will also get to know Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the biggest Pterosaur, with recent estimates putting it at 500 pounds give or take.
Along with all the video screens in “Pterosaurs,” modern touches include big models of pterosaurs that hang overhead and the visually impressive exhibit-closing diorama of a lagoon in Brazil where several different types of fossils have been found.
“They found fossil fish, they found two different types of pterosaurs … fossil plants … dinosaurs and crocodiles,” McGee says. “They’ve re-created this environment, which is pretty cool.”