![]() A few days later, one of the ranchers rode into Tombstone to gather supplies and a posse of “several prominent men” to head out into the desert and retrieve the creature “before it is mutilated”. Unable to move the huge beast, they cut off the tip of one wing and took it home. (That part of the story seems particularly implausible, as there is no evidence that pterosaurs, nor any other flying creature, had wingspans anywhere near that big.) The wing, they estimated, was 78 feet long, making the total tip-to-tip wingspan of the creature about 160 feet - the same as a modern Boeing 767 passenger jet. With some difficulty, the men extended one of the creature’s wings, which was covered in “a thick, almost transparent membrane”. The men noted that the creature had two legs, like a bird, but was entirely featherless and hairless, and that its smooth skin had been easily penetrated by their bullets. ![]() Its head was about 8 feet long, its eyes were “as large as dinner plates”, and its jaws were set with thick rows of sharp teeth. According to the Epitaph, the creature's body was an infeasible 92 feet long. The ranchers proceeded to examine the creature and reported some startling measurements. The men cautiously approached, their horses snorting with terror, and found that the creature was dead.” According to the report, “the monster partly rolled over and remained motionless. The wounded and exhausted animal turned on the men as they approached, but the ranchers were able to keep out of its way and fire a few more “well-directed shots”. The ranchers pursued the creature on its stop-start flight on an “exciting chase of several miles.”Ĭowboys being cowboys, as soon as they got within rifle range, the ranchers opened fire and hit the creature. It immediately took to the sky, but, in its exhaustion, was only able to fly short distances before returning to the ground. After the “first shock of wild amazement”, the ranchers pulled out their Winchester rifles and rushed at the creature. 1Īccording to a report in the Tombstone Epitaph on the following Saturday, the creature appeared to be exhausted and resting on the ground when the two ranchers approached. The strange creature encountered by the ranchers became known as the Tombstone Pterodactyl, or the “Tombstone Thunderbird”. ![]() The nearest town, about 20 miles to the north east, was Tombstone, the famed setting of the 1881 Gunfight at the OK Corral. But in 1890, only four years after the end of the Apache wars, white settlers were only just arriving and setting up ranches and homesteads around Fort Huachuca, Arizona’s major army base. Today, the city of Sierra Vista sits in the valley between the mountain ranges. The encounter occurred on Sunday, 20 April 1890, in the remote desert between the Whetstone and Huachuca Mountains, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border and west of the San Pedro River. It was, according to a report from the time, “a winged monster, resembling a huge alligator with an extremely elongated tail and immense pair of wings.” The creature was identified as a flying reptile thought to have been extinct since the Late Jurassic period about 150 million years ago-a living and breathing pterodactyl. In the spring of 1890, two ranchers were returning home on horseback across the southern Arizona desert when they encountered a very strange creature.
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