Quetzalcoatlus

'Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny...of gravity!'

Chapter 17: Quetzalcoatlus

Choosing an animal beginning with Q was hard. The quokka would have been a happy choice.

page 248: the Great bustard may be heavy but ever year it migrates 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles).

page 249: California condors were brought to the brink of extinction, in part, because of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning remains a significant threat today. Recent research suggests that condors in California remain chronically exposed to harmful levels of lead.

page 256: Louise at Lulu's bookshelf notes that Objective Ministries is reported to be a fake. When I researched and wrote this chapter in 2008/9 I wasn't sure, and wrote tongue in cheek. In line with Poe's law, there are real beliefs which look equally absurd. See for example here and here.

page 259: balloonist. Seamus Perry reviews Richard Holmes's delightful history.

This is the eighteenth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

The incredible heaviness of being

Image: Mark Witton

Twenty-sixth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 17: Quetzalcoatlus

page 246 (margin): flight consistently features in human dreams. For Italo Calvino, flight is not solely about the fantastical. In 'Lightness', one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he writes:

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean into escaping dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

page 250: Quetzalcoatlus...may have [weighed more than] 100kg and had a wingspan of 11-12 metres. Mark Witton and Michael Habib argue it had a mass of up to 200-250kg, and a wingspan of 10-11m.

Luis Rey

page 251: More than 100 million years after Sharovipteryx, a creature called Microraptor evolved both fore and hind wings. It was not a success.

page 256: ropen: websites such as livepterosaur show that the forces of daftness have not been extinguished on Planet Earth.

page 259: the 14-bis...first flew suspended from [a] dirigible:

page 261: biofuels. There are reports that versions under development by companies such as Bio Fuel Systems could be 'better than carbon neutral.'

page 262 (margin): See Grinding the Crack and Sense of Flying.

page 263: gravity 'as sovereign as love'.  Cosmically, it is more so if Caleb Scharf is right that black holes drive the evolution of the universe.

P.S. 18 December: A section of this chapter that was cut before publication touched on aerobiology. A version of that section is here. See Caleb Scharf on trans-planetary microbes.

Wings

So the birdman has admitted his powered flight was a fake.

Not exactly surprising given basic mechanics and biology.

The whole thing was an art project, and the artist played skillfully with a profound and enduring dream.

The dream of flight is most strikingly expressed in the activity which brings people closest to actual unassisted flight: wingsuited base-jumping. Their achievements are become more astonishing by the year. See, for example, here and here.

The dream is a focus of the Quetzalcoatlus chapter in my book, which will be out in October.