Terror dactyl
Everyone knows the song Frere Jacques that begins:
Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Which translates as:
"Friar James, Friar James
are you sleeping, are you sleeping?"
Naturally I like to parody it as:
"Terror Dactyl, Terror Dactyl,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Though of course if one met a pterosaur (extinct flying reptile) large enough to be considered a "terror dactyl" one wouldn't be urging it to wake up but singing it a lullaby.
In "Land Before Swine" 28 June 2013 Waddles the pig is snatched by a terrifying "terror dactyl" that might or might not resemble a pterodactyl or a pteranodon or a quetzelcoatlius or some other known type. The heroes trace it to an abandoned church above abandoned mine shafts and natural tunnels. They find dinosaurs preserved in tree sap and a spot where a pterosaur has escaped from the melting sap. They find Waddles in a nest with eggs and lots of human bones. A baby pterosaur hatches and swallows Old Man McGuckett. Our heroes escape from the mines and don't worry about the dinosaurs reviving from the melting sap.
In the final scene Old Man McGuckett crawls out of the collapsed church clutching a spoon and cackling that he ate his way out of the pterosaur that ate him. It is always good for a member of a species of intelligent beings, such as humans, to escape being eaten, but it is kind of disgusting that a cute baby of such a highly endangered species was horribly killed.
Since Old Man McGuckett was still alive in order to cut his way out of the baby pterosaur, he must have been swallowed whole instead of being bitten into many pieces and swallowed piecemeal. Since the baby pterosaur swallowed Old Man McGuckett whole seconds after hatching from the egg it must have been big enough to swallow an adult human whole while still in the egg.
So while still in the egg the baby pterosaur must have had a mouth wide enough to hold something as wide as a man, and a throat wide enough for something as wide as a man to pas through, and a stomach large enough to hold an adult human body with enough air for the human to breath for minutes at least, and enough space for the human to use his arms to dig his way out of the stomach.
Since eggs don't grow once they are laid - the fetus inside merely grows until it fills the egg - the egg must have been big enough to hold the baby pterosaur when it was laid. Thus the mother pterosaur must have been big enough to lay eggs big enough to hold creatures large enough to swallow adult humans whole.
There are many predators on Earth capable of killing a human, biting him into many peaces, and eating all of the pieces.
Some giant snakes are large enough to swallow humans whole. Giant snakes have highly flexible mouths, throats, and stomachs and can open wide enough to swallow humans whole. There are proven cases of giant snakes swallowing babies and children whole, and stories about them swallowing adults whole, though many experts say that the shoulders of adult humans are too wide for snakes to swallow adults like Old Man McGuckett whole.
The largest giant snakes get up to twenty to thirty feet long and weigh up to 200 to 400 pounds. The extinct Titanaboa could have reached 12.8 meters (42 feet) and weighed about 1,135 kilograms (2,500 pounds). I'm sure that Titanaboa could have swallowed an adult human whole.
But giant snakes constrict their prey to death before swallowing them. Snakes that swallow their prey whole alive without poisoning or constricting it to death do so with prey that is very small relative to their size.
Even giant rorqual whales with their gigantic mouths have very narrow throats that a whole human could not squeeze down.
So the only possible living predator that could possibly swallow an adult human whole and thus possibly still alive - for a brief period after being swallowed - is what is probably the largest predator living at the present time and possibly the largest predator that ever lived. The sperm whale Physeter macrochephalus.
Adult males grow much larger than adult females, averaging about 16 meters (52 feet) long and about 41,000 kilograms (45 short tons) in weight. Big males can certainly exceed 18.3 meters (60 feet) and 51,000 kilograms (56 short tons), and if some unconfirmed reports are true, perhaps equal and exceed the largest blue whales.
There are unconfirmed stories about sperm whales swallowing whalers during battles, but the only scientific mention was a human cadaver listed among unusual contents of sperm whale stomachs. The word "cadaver" indicates to me that it was a burial at sea swallowed by the whale instead of someone living when swallowed by the whale - if a corpse was actually found in a whale's stomach.
A 19th century scientist wrote of crawling or wriggling down the throat of a dead sperm hale into the stomach. The whale was 60 feet long - nearly as long as sperm whales are confirmed to get - and the throat was only 18 inches or 1.5 feet wide.
So depending on the baby pterosaur's body structure, it would have had to be somewhere between a 42 foot 1.25 short ton Titanaboa and a sixty foot 56 short ton sperm whale in order to swallow a man whole and alive.
And the mother pterosaur would have had to be big and heavy enough to be able to lay several eggs at a time big and heavy enough to contain baby petrosaurs that are each between the sizes of a 42 foot 1.25 short ton Titanaboa and a 60 foot 56 short ton sperm whale.
Thus she should have been about the size of Rodan, Smaug the Golden, or Ancalagon the Black. A terror dactyl indeed! share