Sandbox:Long-tailed pterosaur
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Species of pterosaurs with long tails have been a mainstay of DeVito Artworks' take on the King Kong universe. They have never been given an official name, but have been described as "a flying dragon" by Carl Denham and as Camazotz by a Mayan seaman, before it was imagined as a descendant of Rhamphorhynchus by Clark Savage Jr. While the exact details of their appearance has changed from project to project, likely due to artistic interpretation, it appears each time as a loosely-described "pterosaur", sometimes with an emphasized long tail. It debuted in Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland's 2005 novel Kong: King of Skull Island and its 2007 comic adaptation, and later reappeared in 2013's crossover novel Doc Savage: Skull Island by Will Murray and again in the 2017 comic special Kong: Gods of Skull Island from BOOM! Studios. The pterosaurs are always seen hunting on Skull Island's coast, proving to be a formidable barrier to entry for almost all visitors to the island.
Design
These pterosaurs are originally described by Brad Strickland in Kong: King of Skull Island with leathery orange skin, a crested head and a forty-foot wingspan and a silhouette "like a flying dragon". However, in the comic adaptation, artist Dan O'Connor depicted the pterosaur as a crestless, green-skinned, long-tailed beast with a tuft of feathers on the back of its head. This created the first significant discrepancy in the creature's design, as the visual in the adaptation is nothing at all like that which was described in the source material.
The comic's depiction seems to have carried over into the 2013 novel Doc Savage: Skull Island by Will Murray. While the nature of the crossover makes the classifications questionable, in the novel, the pterosaurs on the island's coast are given the designation of giant Rhamphorhynchus, with notably crestless heads, black skin, and long "devil-tails". Franchise producer Joe DeVito provided small depictions of this design on the novel's cover art, but in 2016, with the official review and sign-off of DeVito himself, the coastal pterosaurs of Skull Island reappeared in Kong of Skull Island in art by Carlos Magno as large, orange, crested Pteranodons with tails of unremarkable length. The following year, artist Chad Lewis, in Kong: Gods of Skull Island seems to have depicted a mixture of previous appearances, choosing an orange, crested pterosaur with a scruff of feathers and a long, whip-like tail.
Origins
History
Kong: King of Skull Island
When the Wanderer neared Skull Island, Carl Denham's arm was snatched by a creature that he referred to as "a flying dragon". He used his free arm to grab onto the ship's railing, and the pterosaur tried to tear his arm off by flying away. He lost his grip on the railing, and it began to fly away, but it was quickly snapped out of the sky by an immense marine reptile, which dragged it beneath the waves for a meal of its own.
Doc Savage: Skull Island
Comics
- Kong: King of Skull Island (2007)
- Kong of Skull Island (2016)
- Kong: Gods of Skull Island (2017)
- Kong on the Planet of the Apes (2017-18)
Kong: King of Skull Island
Kong: King of Skull Island #0
Kong: King of Skull Island #2
Despite the erroneous depiction in the premiere issue, in a vision of Kong, two green, long-tailed and crested pterosaurs are depicted, alongside other Skull Island wildlife.
Kong of Skull Island
Kong: Gods of Skull Island
A species of pterosaur with a long tail destroyed the plane of missionary explorer James Copland when he first discovered Skull Island.
Gallery
2007 art by Dan O'Connor from Kong: King of Skull Island
2013 art by Joe DeVito from Doc Savage: Skull Island
2016 art by Carlos Magno from Kong of Skull Island
2017 art by Chad Lewis from Kong: Gods of Skull Island
Trivia
- The name "Camazotz" would later be used for a King Kong adversary in the 2021 Monsterverse graphic novel Kingdom Kong.
References
This is a list of references for Long-tailed pterosaur. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
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