Vampire Pterodactyl Conjecture

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

Readers of my blog also know that humanity is unable to accept that a whole range of creatures operate exclusively at night and rarely intersect our own natural niche.  We have been digging up a veritable menagerie.    That characteristic allows even large animals, or perhaps especially allows large animals to evade observation or capture.  The smaller ones do run the real risk of simply been caught by a vehicle and run down and are thusly recovered.

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

We can assume though that we are dealing with a fair number of creatures although there is much that needs to be thought out.  A large number of downed cattle could easily be the handiwork of a single band ranging over several states.  At this point we simply do not know their real needs.

We also have cattle numbers that seem exaggerated and we need to pin down trustworthy numbers.  Ten thousand in ten years or a thousand per year is a rate of several feedings per night by plausibly a couple of creatures at least.  Taken from that perspective, we are looking for a score of marauding bands who may feed every several days or perhaps rarer still.  It is not hundreds and that means that they are simply few enough to produce exactly what we have in terms of sightings which are rare and ambiguous.

Importantly, however such a score of 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 of wandering from roost to roost hundreds of miles apart.

We have applied labels including Chupacabra and Mothman and plausibly Thunder bird from the times of the great buffalo herds.

Whatever they turn out to be, it is clear that they have returned to North America around forty years ago, likely in response to recovering populations decimated perhaps after the advent of the Europeans in the nineteenth century.