Carnegie mural pterosaurs

As I noted yesterday, I kept the few pterosaurs apart from the gallery. This was mostly because I simply couldn’t get very good photos of them. High up on the walls it made photography difficult (and while yes, there are balconies, I was then shooting across the entire hallway).

The first two are from the Late Jurassic layout and it’s not entirely clear what they are supposed to be. That’s no criticism of the artists, the Morrison is rather lacking in pterosaur material and to be honest many of the basal pterosaur look really quite similar, though if pushed I’d probably say the upper ones were rhamphorhynchines and the lower scaphoganthines. At the bottom though is something rather more obvious, it’s Quetzalcoatlus and of course this goes alongside the mounted cast that hangs from the ceiling.




While obviously there’s the old running joke about pterosaur just being pictured alongside sauropods for scale, it’s understandable here where the dinosaurs really are the star of the show and for the Morrison especially (and this is essentially a Morrison exhibit) there’s not much and nothing in the Carnegie collections at all, so their use as ‘background’ is fair enough. Well worth showing though!

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.