Reconstructing the Brazilian pterosaur Caiuajara for the National Aviary
I am excited to announce my first life-sized paleoart sculpture – a reconstruction of the Brazilian tapejarid pterosaur Caiuajara dobruskii for the new Living Dinosaurs exhibit at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I got so excited about this project and the great work they’re doing at the National Aviary that I made a youtube video about the project.
I started to write a big old complicated blog post getting into the nitty gritty of reconstructing pterosaurs but I got exhausted and confused (I struggle with blog posts!) so I decided to make a second video instead utilizing footage from a video chat I had with Dave Hone, covering some of the basics of up-to-date pterosaur wing reconstruction (which I was screwing up in my early designs). Check it out!
If you want to go further down the pterosaur reconstruction rabbit hole and learn, for example, why MOST pterosaur silhouettes meant to show scale are super wrong, you can check out the slew of pterosaur reconstruction posts I put up on patreon as I worked through the tricky process of bringing Caiuajara back from the dead as as sculpture.
If you want to learn more about Caiuajara, and see nice, high-res images of the fossils, check out the scientific paper by Manzig et al describing it. It’s open access!!
If you want to learn more about Archosaurs in general check out Dave Hone‘s blog Archosaur Musings.
You can also follow Dr. Michael Habib (who also advised on this project) on twitter @AeroEvo
Special thanks to everyone at the National Aviary that made this sculpture possible! especially Jennifer Torpie, Cheryl Tracy, Tricia Oneal, Carly Morgan and Robin Weber. Also big shout out to Alanna Regester at Silver Plume Exhibitions for the amazing work on the Living Dinosaurs exhibit. https://spexhibitions.com/
