Pronounced: ter - An - o - don Diet: Carnivore (Meat-Eater) Name Means:"wing without tooth" Length: 30 feet (9 m) Height: - Weight: 45 pounds (20 kilos) Time: Late Cretaceous - 85 MYA

Having grown frustrated that no good Pterosaur kits were available in large scale, I decided to turn the large (24 inch wide) Jurassic Park III Pteranodon figure into a vinyl model. I removed all the plastic joints and the interior battery/speaker , sawed off a 3/4 inch section of the body below the rib cage (the figure's body was way too long). Then I reconnected the legs to the upper body and sculpted the middle with QuickPlastic. Using 3 metal wires and a drill, I put the wings back together, threaded a wire through the body, then connected the wings to it. Finally, I secured the wings to the body, and filled the gaps with QuickPlastic. I tried to make the paint job bright and interesting (while keeping the eye and horn paint of the original figure).

Pteranodon is not a dinosaur, it is a flying reptile. A really big flying reptile! When it spread its wings, it could reach from the front to the back of a school bus. Just imagine something that big flying around. It didn't have feathers, but it may have had a covering of fur, sort of like a bat.

Their diet was probably fish and scavenged remains of dead animals. Quite a few Pteranodon skeletons have been found in Kansas in the central part of the U.S. This would have been the shore of a shallow sea when these creatures were alive, supporting the theory that they were fish eaters

. Members of the pterosaur family lived through much of the Mesozoic, some with wingspans close to 50 feet. Pteranodon, as you can tell by the translation of its name, had no teeth. It probably used the long crest on the back of its head to help it steer while flying. There is still some debate about whether these reptiles could actually fly or if they were primarily gliders, but the consensus seems to be that they could take off with little or no wind.