Now Pteros' children grew to the impossible.
In the late Cretaceous, when the Mesozoic world
Had pushed every boundary of the plausible
In size and strength and strangeness, Pteros unfurled
The largest wings that ever flew.
Quetzal—named for the feathered serpent-god
That humans would later worship—flew through blue
And Cretaceous skies on a wingspan broad
As a fighter aircraft: eleven meters wide,
The membrane stretched from the enormous fourth
Finger to the body, and the stride
Of this creature on the ground was the worth
Of a giraffe—for Quetzal stood
As tall as the tallest modern mammal
When he folded his wings and walked through the wood
On his knuckles and his feet—the animal
Kingdom's tallest flier was also tall
On the ground, and the azhdarchid pterosaurs
Of the late Cretaceous were the overall
Most versatile of all Pteros' floors
Of evolutionary achievement:
They could fly thousands of miles on thermal
And soaring flight, with the bereavement
Of almost zero energy—the dermal
Membrane catching the air like a sail,
And the hollow bones weighing almost nothing—
Quetzal weighed perhaps two hundred pounds, the scale
Of an adult human, despite the buffeting
Size of a small airplane—the architecture
Of the pterosaur body was a cathedral
Of air: hollow bones, air-sac infrastructure
That permeated every strut and needle
Of the skeleton—light as possibility itself.
On the ground, Quetzal was a stork
Of monstrous proportions: walking on the shelf
Of the Cretaceous plain with a beak like a fork
That picked up small dinosaurs, mammals, lizards—
Anything that fit within the enormous
And toothless beak—the terrestrial wizards
Of the azhdarchid lineage, the gorgeous
And improbable hunters who could walk
And fly with equal mastery—the only
Large animals that could soar and stalk
In both dimensions, the sky and the lonely
Flatlands of the Cretaceous interior.
And not only Quetzal ruled the Cretaceous sky:
The ornithocheirids plied the aerial superior
Of the open ocean, fishing on the fly
With skimming lower jaws that cut the wave
And scooped the fish like a living trawl-net—
And the pteranodontids, with their brave
And crested heads like the upswept silhouette
Of a living weather-vane, soared above
The inland seas of the late Cretaceous,
Catching fish in their throat-pouches with the love
Of a pelican's patience—the capacious
And toothless mouths of the late pterosaurs
Were fishing machines of elegant design,
Each species tuned to a different cause
Of aerial hunting: the soaring line
Of the ocean-crossers, the flap-and-glide
Of the coastal fishers, the terrestrial stalking
Of the azhdarchids—Pteros' pride
Was the widest spread of any walking,
Flying, soaring dynasty in the sky.
For eighty million years before the birds
Would claim the aerial niche, the pterosaur's reply
To the air's invitation was the words
Of membrane and bone and the hollow strut
Of an engineering so light it seemed
Impossible—and yet the pterosaur was not
A fragile thing: he flew, he dreamed
In the thermal's lift, he crossed the ocean
On wings that would make the albatross
Seem modest—and his devotion
To the sky was total, and the loss
Of the pterosaurs at the Cretaceous's end
Would leave the air for the birds alone—
The feathered dinosaurs would then extend
Their claim to every sky the pterosaur had known.
Honor Quetzal and his kin—the sky giants,
The largest things that ever flew,
Who proved that with the right alliance
Of hollow bone and membrane, the view
From above belongs to those who dare
To stretch their wings beyond all reason—
And the sky, the boundless sky, the air
Is large enough for every season
Of the impossible made real.