A Pteranodon gliding low over a river valley, drawn as printable line art. Pteranodon was not a dinosaur but a flying reptile that shared the world with them, and the long wings and pointed head crest leave wide, open areas to work with alongside the finer texture of the rocks and plants below. Download and print the PDF free — no registration required.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
What comes to mind when you picture a creature like this gliding overhead?
Can you imagine what the world looked like when flying reptiles crossed the sky?
Have you ever heard that the birds we see today are descended from dinosaurs?
Long before anyone built an aeroplane, animals this size were already crossing the sky.
Was Pteranodon a dinosaur?
No. Pteranodon was a pterosaur — a flying reptile that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs but sat on a separate branch of the reptile family tree. The best-known specimens point to wingspans of roughly six to seven metres, wider than any bird alive today, and the wing itself was built quite differently from either a bird’s or a bat’s: a membrane of skin and muscle stretched from the body along one enormously long finger.
How did Pteranodon fly?
It is usually reconstructed as a long-distance soarer, riding rising air over open water much as an albatross does today. The older picture of an animal that could barely flap and had to launch itself from a cliff has since been revised: the shoulder and forelimb bones are heavily built, and most researchers now think Pteranodon could take off under its own power from level ground.
What was the crest on its head for?
Display is the explanation most researchers favour. Males carried much larger crests than females, which is the pattern you would expect if the crest was used to signal to rivals and mates. It has also been suggested that the crest balanced the long beak or worked as a rudder in flight, though those ideas are harder to test.
