As a biologist and explorer who has searched for both a modern dinosaur and a modern pterosaur in remote areas of the planet, Peter Beach brings to Animal Discovery a rich background and a unique perspective for the educational goals of our nonprofit organization. He is our official biologist.
Beach-Marcy Living-Pterosaur Expedition of 2015
Milt Marcy and Peter Beach, both from the Portland area of Oregon, apparently became the first explorers to bring back to the United States video footage showing the wing shape of a modern pterosaur. How did they succeed in that? By traveling to a remote jungle in western New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, where previous sightings of large “pterodactyls” had been reported by three American eyewitnesses: members of the Sconce family.
Marcy and Beach had been on an expedition in Africa, many years earlier, when they were searching for the Mokele-mbembe, a potential sauropod dinosaur. But here’s a brief account of their more-recent expedition, which was in the southwest Pacific.
Before they could travel into the remote interior of western New Britain Island, they had to wait for some degree of local recovery from a recent tropical cyclone. They eventually were able to take a helicopter into the jungle.
As the helicopter landed, natives were standing around wondering who these visitors were and what they were doing there, but they soon met the local missionaries and started to get settled in.
Pete and Milt chose a nearby hilltop for their viewing point. When the natives understood that the Americans had made a comment about the obstruction of some small tree there, those villagers quickly chopped down the trees for them.
Six days after their arrival, the two Americans had their sighting. Here is Pete’s account, in his own words:
“I was in my hammock [sick], and I heard ‘big bird, big bird’ . . . I came out; I grabbed a camera that I had . . . and I looked up in the sky . . . It was almost directly above me. It was large, larger than any of the eagles or any of the other birds that we’d seen: leathery, had the claws on the wings . . . I saw the animal; I was stunned . . .”
Unfortunately the creature was almost in the direction of the sun, and he was unable to get a zoomed-in video recording of it before it ascended up further away from them. The result was poor-quality video, to say the least.
On the other hand, both explorers were able to get a much-better view with their eyes than is now seen in the video footage. Strange to tell, although it appears to have been the same kind of apparent “pterodactyl” seen by three other Americans in this area of New Britain Island, it is not the same species as the ropen of nearby Umboi Island, where Jonathan Whitcomb interviewed many natives in 2004.
