Word: pterodactyl
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bird that rolled out of the hangar at Toulouse, one year late for its first test flight, had the ungainly look of a pterodactyl. Its drooping snout reared four stories above the Tarmac; the delta wings that extended from its tubular 191-ft. body seemed barely big enough to support it. But when Test Pilot Andre Turcat gunned the cluster of four jet engines, the Concorde climbed swiftly and steeply. After 27 minutes of subsonic flight, it made an equally flawless, steep-pitched landing. After that, champagne corks popped around Blagnac Airport, and newspapers in Britain and France brought...
...bloated, like an octopus with tentacles waving, a man-eating plant, or an anchor squiggling into a second life as a giant sting ray. Still others are stalklike, stiffly articulated into a stack of tibias, and one hangs off the wall-looking for all the world like a pterodactyl. Or then again, maybe a stuffed moose...
Examples: "Are your staff all runaways from the asylum?" "I asked for the bill, not the National Budget." "Was this omelette made with pterodactyl eggs?" "This tip is twice as much as you deserve." "Get your slimy hands off my bottom...
...away with the tide. But some are such masterpieces that they regularly cause crack-ups by gawking drivers on the nearby freeway. One is a 12-ft. gallows with the 13 steps and a hanging effigy, its neck snapped at a medically correct angle. Another is a dinosaur and pterodactyl combination well planted in the muck. Last week a 17-year-old high-schooler named Wayne Saxton finished his fifth dereliction - a mammoth Viking warrior standing almost 20 ft. high. "I like Vikings," said he, as if that explained everything...
Monsters are out. After almost a decade of gigantic grasshoppers, monstrous mollusks and vicious vegetables, the menace merchants have surveyed their shrinking returns and concluded that overwork at last had killed the pterodactyl that laid the golden egg. With that the world's leading gooseflesh peddlers-American International Films of Hollywood and Hammer Film Productions Ltd. of London-decided to go back on the ghoul standard. The bats were summoned from the industry's well-stocked belfry, and in recent months they have been sucking the green stuff out of the public at an impressive rate. Three...