Flying Monsters
When: 11 a.m., 2 and 6 p.m.
Where: Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 1945 S.E. Water Ave.
Tickets: $8.50; $6.50 for youths, students with ID and people 63 and older.
Picture something the body size of a giraffe. Now imagine that its spindly, longer front legs are joined to its shorter back legs by a thin membrane of wing. Now erase the giraffe's head and replace it with one something like a stork's, with a tapering beak the size of a human.
What you have isn't the result of some fantasy illustrator's fever dream, but rather Quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying creature ever and the star of the new IMAX film "Flying Monsters," which opened Friday at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's Omnimax theater.
It's the latest in the seemingly infinite series of projects from the mind of British naturalist David Attenborough, and focuses on the dinosaurs that soared above their leaden brethren. When we think of dinosaurs, it's the tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs and velociraptors that get most of the press, but as "Flying Monsters" makes clear, their aerial counterparts were just as fascinating and unusual.
The movie uses sophisticated and vivid computer animation, in conjunction with Attenborough's avuncular, familiar narration, to trace the development of winged dinosaurs, or pterosaurs, from their first appearance 220 million years ago. Although the film will be shown at OMSI in 2-D rather than the 3-D in which it was filmed, it's still an immersive, impressive experience, even if you're sometimes too aware of the extra missing dimension.
In one segment, bits of fossilized skeleton emerge from a hunk of rock and form themselves into a coherent whole, offering insight into how paleontologists depict an entire creature based on a few bone fragments. In another, we see how computer modeling of a pterosaur's movement can show whether it spent most of its time walking, flying or hanging. Again, a valuable illustration of the work scientists do.
In fact, what makes "Flying Monsters" stand out among the IMAX science-film set is its sophistication and its unwillingness to dumb the material down or settle for eye-popping spectacle. An essay on the website boingboing.net a couple of weeks ago decried the lack of exhibits geared above a grade-school level in science museums. This film is a solid corrective to that trend, which is not to say that children won't enjoy it, but that the emphasis is on methodology and facts as much as on cool-looking beasts gliding over magnificent landscapes.
And some of the facts about Quetzalcoatlus are quite astounding. I spoke with Douglas A. Lawson, the paleontologist who first unearthed a quetzal bone in Texas in 1971 (and is interviewed in the movie), to verify some of the more outrageous-seeming claims. For instance, the film depicts the creatures soaring above the clouds in the sort of image you'd expect in an ad for Quetzalcoatlus Airlines. It also claims estimates of a flight speed of 85 to 100 mph, and a range of up to 10,000 miles (or more than halfway around the Earth) in a single flight.
Really?
"They couldn't get to any higher elevation than regular birds like condors, say 10,000 feet or so," Lawson says. "There were some rather high escarpments they could have launched from, but it seems unlikely. Also, it's physically possible that they might not be torn to bits if they flew that fast, but it wouldn't be pleasant. And, again, there might be the possibility that their metabolism would allow them to fly as far as 10,000 miles under optimum conditions, but I don't know if that ever happened. There's no evidence of pterosaur migration, although that doesn't mean it didn't happen."
And what about the possibility that a special sense enabled them to sense the thermal updrafts they needed to stay aloft for long periods?
"There's no evidence of that, and I expect they relied upon visual evidence like the color of the ground to know where those spots would be. The only animal which has a thermal sense like that is the pit viper, which only evolved the ability to spot warm-blooded prey."
Despite a few questionable efforts, then, at exaggerating the already impressive résumé of the quetzal, "Flying Monsters" does a solid job of illuminating a relatively obscure chapter of the dinosaur saga.
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