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On May 17, 1986, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unleashed its flying reptile at Andrews Air Force Base. Known as Q.N. to the engineers and experts who created the flyer, the model was a half-size replica of the immense pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi that had just been discovered a decade before. Technically called an ornithopter, because it was meant to be birdlike in the way it flew, Q.N. was a mock-up with an 18-foot wingspan. “We had to go through the evolutionary cycle in our development, just like nature did. But we were going about a million years a week,” project leader Paul MacCready told the Los Angeles Times earlier that year. Q.N. had chewed through $700,000 in funding and staggered through a series of crashes before the flapping aircraft was finally ready to fly.

More than 300,000 people gathered at the air base, ready to see a pterosaur—or something pterosaur-like—take to the air for the first time in 66 million years. The reptile-like flying machine had done just fine out in the arid desert of Death Valley, where it was filmed for the IMAX movie On the Wing, so a tour around Andrews seemed simple enough. But crowds may have left the event wondering how such animals could have taken to the air in the first place. Soon after being released from a tow line used to get Q.N. into the air, the mechanical pterosaur began to spin and turn so sharply that the faux-reptile’s neck snapped, and it crashed, headless, to the ground.

Despite Q.N.’s public embarrassment, however, the ornithopter’s inspiration has lived on. In the early 1990s, when Q.N. was still in storage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, curator Russell Lee made the case that the pterosaur should be accessioned into the collection as an important part of aviation history. “A lot of thought and effort went into developing this thing,” Lee says, adding Q.N. was a state-of-the-art aircraft despite its failure. And now, the spirit of Q.N. lives on as experts are going back to these ancient creatures to find new ways to fly, from aircraft with pterosaur-like crests to pterosaur-inspired spacecraft exploring the nooks and crannies of Mars.

Despite the family resemblance, pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. Rather, they were close evolutionary cousins of the dinosaurs that shared many of the same biological hallmarks. A hot-blooded metabolism, bodies covered in multicolored feathers, and lightweight bones assisted the rise of the pterosaurs at the same time that dinosaurs were beginning to stalk around on land around 243 million years ago. But what makes pterosaurs immediately distinctive are their wings.

The wing of a pterosaur was much more like a bat’s than a bird’s. Pterosaurs all shared extremely elongated fourth fingers—the equivalent of your ring fingers—that could be longer than the entire rest of their bodies. These hyper-elongated digits supported thin membranes that connected to the reptile’s sides and legs, sometimes with some accessory membranes attached between the legs and hips. Even though pterosaurs also had feathers on their heads, necks, and torsos, they relied on these leathery wings to get aloft. But how they used their membrane-based wings stumped paleontologists for nearly two centuries.

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An artist’s illustration of Quetzalcoatlus flying De Agostini via Getty Images

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