If giraffes were predators they would look both hilarious and terrifying while sneaking up on their prey
I’m afraid you’ve missed the predatory giraffes by about 66 million years mate.
These guys are Azhdarchid pterosaurs, and they were some of the strangest reptiles to ever exist. They were perfectly capable of flight, but their physiology suggests that they may have spent a significant portion of their lives hunting on the ground.
The largest of them could reach over 5 metres tall while standing, and had a 10-metre wingspan. They varied greatly in body type, from the tall, spindly forms of Quetzalcoatlus and Arambourgiania (images 4 and 1-2 respectively) to the heavy brute strength of Hatzegopteryz, a species that may have used its head to bludgeon its prey (images 2 and 3).
There has never been another flying animal before or since to have reached such incredible sizes, nor any predator so intimidatingly tall. Well, not any that we know of yet.
All of these illustrations are by Mark Witton, a palaeontologist and artist who specialises in pterosaurs. This is his blog about palaeontology and the science of reconstructing extinct species. You can find out more about each of these images here, here and here.
(Oh, and by the way … these are NOT dinosaurs)
What the hell these are so intimidating, why aren’t these in any dinosaur movies
Just imagine it …
The protagonists and a few disposable minor characters are walking carefully through a forest at night, covered by a thick fog. They know there are dinosaurs everywhere, but they can’t see more than three metres in front of their own faces.
Eventually they stop near a small cluster of trees to rest. As they sit there, exhausted, one of the trees begins to move. Everyone freezes, terrified. They have no idea what this thing is.
Then a massive beak slams down, longer than a person is tall, and plucks one of the minor characters off his feet and into the air.
The small group erupts into movement, frantically running away from whatever those things are. There’s two of them now, and as the fog begins to clear the group are able to make out more of their shape. They are huge, with long, spindly necks topped with a massive, daggerlike head. The long legs that they once mistook for trees have an almost mechanical movement as the giant creatures stalk towards them. And then comes the next terrible surprise.
These things can run.
It’s a short film.
How could those things possibly fly? Could they take off from the ground or did they need a cliff like bats do?
(The pterosaur in the video I linked isn’t an azhdarchid, but it gets the general picture across)
because it wasn’t terrifying enough already….
How does something that big have hollow bones though? Wouldn’t they break under the pressure of pole vaulting themselves?
Basically, azhdarchid bones aren’t just “hollow”. They’re actually full of an incredibly complex network of spongy strands of bone that functions almost like scaffolding to support the bones and make them a lot stronger than they would initially appear. A lot of dinosaurs, including very large ones, had this same sort of bone structure as well.
It’s a delicate balance between being light enough to fly and strong enough to take off and staying in the air, but they certainly weren’t skinny, lightweight pushovers like they’re often portrayed.
