Here goes nothing (redux)

It occurs to me that I don't really have much of an easily updatable, online home at present. My regular internet haunts aren't really suitable for rapid uploading lots of images or interacting with others. My Flickr site is too constrictive on comments and posting, and the Pterosaur.Net blog is a shared site that I don't want to clog with my garbage. Hence, I thought I'd set up a sister blog to my website, where I can post all the images I like, and you can comment all you like, without any hassle*. The objective here is to give myself an outlet for the paintings, ketches, diagrams and other media I've been making for the last few years, but rarely sees the light of day outside of its intended use and occasional posts on Facebook. My plan is to keep this rather straightforward by being word-light and picture-heavy, which should keep the post level up to at least one a week.

*For a few weeks, a version of this has been live at my website, but it communicated poorly with social network sites, so I've moved house to Blogger. Anyone who saw the old version of this post may be feeling a sense of deja vu, but new content will follow soon. Honest.

With that in mind, I'll leave this first opening post here. For the unitiated, the picture above is a full colour version of the opening image to a blog post, and now a full length lecture I recently gave at the University of Portsmouth, about speculative interactions between humans and pterosaurs, called 'Our Lives with Pterosaurs'. Just for fun, I've posted the poster used to advertise the talk below, too. I tried to capture some of the characteristic poster design common to Westerns made in the 50s and 60s, what with the wavy title and quotes from a critic (or Mike Taylor) and all. It's up to the viewer to decide whether the guy riding the azhdarchid is going to burst into 'The Deadwood Stage' from Calamity Jane as he soared away.

Anyway, enough nonsense. Were pterosaurs strong enough to carry humans to work throught the skies? Were they big enough to eat people? Head here, and to the follow up post here, to find out.