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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pterodactyl
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Some like dragons with wings, others great birds like pterodactyls.
▪ The Jet Ranger arced upwards, a big prehistoric pterodactyl lurching blindly in its death throes.
▪ We have no way of knowing whether any other animals now extinct - pterodactyls perhaps? - also evolved the technology independently.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pterodactyl

Pterodactyl \Pter`o*dac"tyl\, n. [Gr. ? a wing + ? finger, toe: cf. F. pt['e]rodactyle.] (Paleon.) An extinct flying reptile; one of the Pterosauria. See Illustration in Appendix.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pterodactyl

extinct flying reptile, 1830, from French ptérodactyle (1821), from Modern Latin genus name Pterodactylus, from Greek pteron "wing" (see ptero-) + daktylos "finger" (see dactyl).

Wiktionary
pterodactyl

n. 1 (lb en paleontology) A pterosaur in the genus (taxlink Pterodactylus genus noshow=1). 2 (lb en informal) Any pterosaur.

WordNet
pterodactyl

n. extinct flying reptile

Wikipedia
Pterodactyl (film)

Pterodactyl is a 2005 horror film that premiered on the Sci Fi Channel. The film is directed by Mark L. Lester.

Pterodactyl (disambiguation)

Pterodactyl refers to:

  • Pterodactylus, the genus of the first pterosaur known to science, Pterodactylus antiquus.
    • A Pterodactlyid, a pterosaur of the Pterodactylidae family.
      • A Pterodactloid, a pterosaur of the Pterodactyloidea suborder.
        • A Pterosaur, an archosaur of the Pterosauria order.

Usage examples of "pterodactyl".

She reminded Alastair Bing, who was afraid of her, of the reconstruction of a pterodactyl he had once seen in a German museum.

Then the pterodactyl burst upon the world in all his impressive solemnity and grandeur, and all Nature recognized that the Cenozoic threshold was crossed and a new Period open for business, a new stage begun in the preparation of the globe for man.

Katey, if you were to come upon an ichthyosaurus or a pterodactyl asleep in the shubbery, you would hardly expect your report of it to be believed all at once either by Harry or Janet.

English wood, had been suddenly stricken aghast by the presence of the slimy and loathsome terror of the ichthyosaurus, the original of the stories of the awful worms killed by valourous knights, or had seen the sun darkened by the pterodactyl, the dragon of tradition.

Since the loonie moldies want you to visit, Sally had the idea of asking Flapper to come down and peck like a pterodactyl.

She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls.

Then followed various untimed periods, during which animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea, the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air.

His expression was as simple as resentment without understanding can be: now like plesiosaurus laboring all four limbs for the paddles they were, lifting a small head to see pterodactyl raise its absurd body on more absurd wings and with cumbrous scaling gain the sky, a ridiculous place to be, certainly, but for that moment he watched, disconcerting to plesiosaurus, to whom no such extravagance had ever occurred and who, by no feat of skill or imagination, could hope to accomplish it now.

Above all, the stringless kites, the warplane nightmare pterodactyls, scissoring the mists, kettle-drumming the winds, flirting and shuttering like ugly fans, like books of horror, in the always-murdered and so always-drying crimson sky.

And the flying dinosaurs -- the archaeopteryx and the pterodactyl -- became the most mobile creatures the earth had ever known.

Alea saw that the reddish-brown creature on his wrist was no bird, but a sort of pterodactyl, though its head did look rather like that of a horse and its neck and backbone sprouted a row of triangular plates that stretched down its tail to an arrowpoint on the end.

And as she steps out onto the patio, her Valkyrian bosom undulating with each step like a viscous liquid, a pterodactyl swoops down from the sky, snatches her in its beak, flies her to its nest, and drops her into the shrieking rictus of its offspring.

Just as the holos of Peter, Wendy, and the lost boys had flown within a few meters of the floater, several pterodactyls now swooped in to eye them suspiciously.

I had to fight the pterodactyls and pteranodons for every scrap of food.

Will young people of today doubt me if I aver with a straight face that the Ohio skies back then were often darkened by flocks of hooting pterodactyls, and that forty-ton brontosaurs basked and crooned in the Cuyahoga River's ooze?