Horniman pterosaurs

Yesterday I put up some photos of the gloriously anachronistic dinosaurs at the Horniman museum. As you’ll have already deduced from the title that they also had a couple of pterosaur models. While presumably hailing from the same era (and perhaps even that same artist) they are not quite as inaccurate, though this is, I suspect, more to do with the fact that our ideas of pterosaurs have changed less over time (or in some cases returned to an earlier idea), rather than any greater level of detail being paid to the pterosaurs.

While there are (inevitably) some mistakes, the only really standout one is the neck of the Pteranodon. It’s absolutely tiny and makes it look like the head has just been welded onto the body. Given that one of the defining characteristics of the pterodactyloids is the long neck, and that in Pteranodon it should be about half to two-thirds of the length of the skull, this is far from a good representation of a pretty basic bit of anatomy.

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