When Flying Dinosaurs Were Drones

February 17, 2011

The skies over Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles and across the Mojave, are resplendent with drones. From Northrop’s new X-47B, a jet-powered stealth craft shaped like a giant bat, to AeroVironment’s nano hummingbird, a tiny, hummingbird-shaped airship, the military’s robotic flying machines have been making headlines lately, including the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times.

While these spy machines will end up in the hands of the CIA, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines, they receive much of their early funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). For as new and cutting edge as it seems, DARPA has been producing advanced-drone programs since the time of Sputnik, and the result is a long list of radical, animal-like surveillance packages.

One of the more interesting and more ancient drones ever built is the Quetzalcoatlus Northropi (QN for short), also produced by the Monrovia-based AeroVironment. On first glance, the drone looks like a giant pelican. In fact, it is a replica of a flying dinosaur.

The 140-million-year-old pterodactyl was first discovered in Texas in 1971 by a geology graduate student named Douglas A. Lawson. When the original fossil was found, Quetzalcoatlus Northropi became the largest flying creature ever known to inhabit the skies. Its wingspan is estimated to be 36–39 feet.

The flying dinosaur was named after the legendary Aztec feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl and John “Jack” Northrop, founder of Northrop Corporation and the inventor of the B-2 stealth bomber, or flying wing.

Way back in 1985, when QN first took flight, it was AeroVironment and not Northrop that decided to turn the flying-dinosaur concept into a spy drone. With the help of DARPA, the company created a half-scale model of the extinct bird (shown above) with a wingspan of 18 feet and a body weight of 40 pounds.

It even had fake feathers, or “external cosmetics [intended] to closely match the original animal of 140 million years ago,” says the company on its Website.

Unlike the nano hummingbird, which looks and flies like a real hummingbird and is meant to peer in windows, if a Quetzalcoatlus Northropi appeared overhead or outside your home, it might trigger suspicion that something was amiss.

Photos: AeroVironment’s Quetzalcoatlus Northropi in flight. An artist’s rendition of the flying dinosaur.

Comments

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Just a minor point, but neither Quetzalcoatlus northropi nor any other pterosaur had feathers - a characteristic shared by birds and some theropod dinosaurs. Some early pterosaurs did have hair-like structures. Also, pterosaurs were not "birds" as this article states - they were a group of reptiles that are only very distantly related to dinosaurs and their close relatives- birds.

As you may have easily determined, this is the movement of your lower back curling when your head comes closer to the knees. - A typical riding position.

Cycling shorts, knickers or tights - again it depends on the type of bicycle touring you are doing with some cyclists taking the traditional shorts while other take the baggy shorts which have handy pockets.

One of the more interesting and more ancient drones ever built is the Quetzalcoatlus Northropi (QN for short), agreed.

Quetzalcoatlus northropi is about 66 million years old.

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