Quetzalcoatl: The Winged Serpent

so it's October. You know we're doing stuff related to monsters, horror movies. What on earth was that? Robert? That was a was? It was part of the trailer to Cue the Winged Serpent, released in nineteen eighty two, written and directed by b movie legend Larry Cohen. Oh the guy who made God Told Me To Yeah, also known for It's Alive and the Stuff. This particular film, though, is it's, in my opinion, a real gym because it's it's nine

two New York, so it's essentially like late seventies New York. Yeah. It it really gets that grimy nous and that doomy nous. I've I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is about, like late seventies New York in movies, where it just there's this grim, fatalistic, doomy kind of cynicism that everybody's got where it's like they know the end of the world is coming soon. Yeah, I mean what part of it is that? I mean, we could do you could do a whole episode, the whole podcast series

just on that vibe. I mean, really, the the HBO series The Deuce is kind of attempting to do the same thing, looking particular at particular areas of of the culture during that time. But yeah, I think there's a certain national cynicism, and then there obviously some some major issues going on in New York City at the time. Uh.

This trailer adds a little extra issue to that. Heap that being a giant, uh flying serpentine creature that may or may not be an Aztec god that is roosting somewhere in the city and occasionally a soaring down to grab a Sunbathe is off the roofs of New York City skyscrapers and window washers, window washers, cops, anybody who happens to be up there within reach. Now, essentially this creature is a dragon, right, It is a giant, angry looking bird lizard thing. I don't really I don't think

it has feathers, does it. No, it's very very smooth, very reptilian. It looks kind of like a winged saua pod with enormous eyes. It's a very strange design. But it's stopped motions, so every moment you spend with it in the film is magic. So this movie is you know, it's got that that grimy, nasty, sleazy B movie quality, that late seventies Larry Cohen kind of thing. But it's also kind of good. It's like, it's got a funny script.

There's like a great scene where the cops are about to storm the nest of the of the dragon creature and one of them is just drinking a Budweiser. Yeah, it has an ingenious plot because well, I don't know, maybe not ingenious, but it has a clever plot that I really like for a monster movie. Uh, which, just to run through the cast real quick, You've got Candy Clark, you have David Carradine, you have Richard Rowntree, David Carradine Beta Carotene. Why is it every time I say David Carradine,

I want to say beta Caroteen. I don't know, he's he's just rich in it, I guess. But most importantly, you have Michael Moriarty, who's just great at playing a down on his luck slee's bag, and he really brings it in this movie. Reviews from the year it came out pretty much agreed with this him and they were like, I don't know about this monster movie, but that Michael

Moriarty is fabulous, and he is fabulous in it. He plays essentially, yeah, this New York sleeves bag who I think he's involved in a diamond highst and he flees and he ends up stumbling upon the nest of the of Q the Winged Serpent, because he just happens to climb to the top of the Chrysler building. I don't remember why he does that. He's just like, well, I'm

up here now. But he discovers like where the monster that is terrorizing the city is located, where it's egg is located, and so what does he do with this heroic information? He blackmails the city. I was just right, babe me a million dollars and and give me immunity for all my crimes or I won't tell you where the egg is. Yes, and there there's some other elements

to the plot that really uh fun as well. That there's one scene, and this is in the trailer where David Decaradine's police officer character's detective character says, this thing has been prayed back into existence. And there's this whole plot with like an az Tec cult and ritual murders. Um, it's it's it's a fabulously fun film. Now with the nod to the to the cult and with Q standing in for quetzel Kadal, Uh, it's clear that the beast in this film is a monster ified version of the

ancient meso American god ketzel Coadal. And I think it's worth stopping to appreciate that the the original ketsel Coadal, the feathered serpent, is not a monster, but is a holly magnificent god of the heavens. Right, And it's unfair to really do associated with a bunch of blood sacrifice. Though we were discussing this little offline before we came in here. That's often where a lot of people's imagination goes when they are reminded of the Aztec civilization or

other meso American or or South American civilizations. Yeah, this is one thing that I think is is kind of sad and unfair that that ancient meso American religions often get associated with human sacrifice. And it's not unfair because there was no human sacrifice. So there there was, It's pretty clear that that was a feature of some ancient

meso American religion. But what's unfair is that it's like meso American religion gets singled out for association with human sacrifice when human sacrifice is just everywhere in the ancient world. There's evidence that the ancient Greeks probably did human sacrifice, the you know, ancient Nordic religions, you know, the Celts and the Scandinavians. I mean, everywhere you look, you'll find evidence of human sacrifice somewhere back in time. So it's

not like this was unique to the Mesoamerican religions. So in this episode, we're going to mostly talk about the religious origins of quetzo Quaddle as well as some of the things that it has inspired uh and may have inspired yet we're gonna talk a little bit about serpents that actually sort of fly through the air. We're also going to talk about a particular prehistoric flying creature that

has been named in the Quetzo kadals honor. But let's start with the god itself, quetzal Kadal, the plumed serpent. Tell me about this god, Robert. So, in reading a bit about the plume serpent god, a number of things it became really clear. Um. I was one book I picked up was RUDOLPHO Andy as a fictional Lord of the Dawn the legend of Quetzo Kwaddle, which is I say fictional. Basically, what he attempted to do in this book is to provide a narrative, easily read, narrative version

of Quetzo Quaddle's story. And I actually saw a really good user review for this where they pointed out, you know, with with Greek myths in particular, it's not just archaeological and anthropo anthropological information that we're exposed to as a kid. We were exposed to the stories themselves. We get to kind of experience the stories as just pure stories. And this particular reviewer was saying, you know, I had trouble finding that with meso American religions, and this book provided that.

So in the book itself is is a very good I'll mention a little bit more as we go forward, but there's an introduction in this book from the University of New Mexico's David M. Johnson, and yeah, he does a great job of just just rolling through, like what was quetzo kaddle, what did what did it stand for? And what is our what do we know? What do we not know about it? And he points out that there's a lot that we do not know about the toll Tech Empire. This would be uh, one of the

empire's proceeding of the Aztec Empire. He says, he said that we're only we're only talking the Mesoamerican world roughly seven hundred years ago, so we're not going into the the the ancient past really uh. He says that we know more about Athens of two thousand years ago or Hebraic traditions from three thousand years ago. Uh, meso American world against seven h years ago, and there's so much

we don't know. And he says this is largely because Spanish friars did what they could to destroy the codices of the Aztecs in the Maya. We have to remember that the most obvious thing here is that this was a world that was invaded by Westerners, by the Spanish, by the Portuguese UH and UH, and that the culture was ravaged for it. On top of this, the hieroglyphic style books of the Aztecs UH were there to apparently aid in the memorization of oral literature. So imagine, perhaps

this is my my read on the scenario. Imagine if only the illustrations and the illuminations of Christian stories survived, but the Bible did not, or we had you know, mostly artwork to go by uh in order to figure out what the Greek pantheon consisted of, you know, and what the stories were that were associated with those individuals. I think that that's just a rough example to sort of outline the problems of not having the you know,

complete access to the information. But so in general, there's been a great loss of Mesoamerican literature that was in many ways caused by colonialism. Yeah. He pointed out in this that only something like sixteen books survive, three Mayan, six Wahaka books, and that most of what we know about pre conquest culture in Mesoamerica comes from archaeological evidence and postconquest scribes and scholars, but quetzo Quaddle seems to have existed in this pantheon of meso American culture for

a while. Is this kind of wind god who creates the earth by lifting up the heavens. And he was probably a very old god emerging from the beliefs of coastal regions associated with shells and wind and sea. The the quet soul part of his name refers to a rare bird with precious green feathers, feathers used in ceremonial dresses, and um At should point out that there you can look up pictures of quets as they are like five different species of quets als and there, and their feathers

are quite beautiful. They're found in Mexico in the extreme southern United States. Yeah, I think does the Does the name refer to their long tail feathers? Is that right? I believe so. And these would have been used in uh various religious attire. They are beautiful birds. And now the cowaddle aspect of the name that refers to a snake tied to earth energy fertility in the cyclical nature of life. So in this combo UH, this god, we

have a convergence of earthly and spiritual energy. We have a creature of the ground and a creature of the sky, both as one, and he went by other names as well. He was known as Kukulkin in the Yucatan and Guku Mats in Guatemala. In devotion to the feathered serpent spread as far north as New Mexico and south to Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia. And of course outside of this tradition, obviously we have to point to the fact that this is

not the only tradition that involves a winged serpent. You encounter feathered serpents and other religions as well, uh and in Europe and Asia. And essentially, as we pointed out with with Q from the movie, it's it's not that different from other ideas of a dragon, a great holy

winged creature. Now, I don't want to try to over smooth or overconform the differences between different mythical beasts from around the world, but I am always fascinated by the fact that it seems to me, you know, if if I'm not over you know, over generalizing that so many different cultures have something like a dragon. There's the European dragon, the ancient Near Eastern dragon, the Chinese dragon. And then if we're saying cuetzel Kadal is in many ways kind

of like a dragon. Is that? Um? Is that just us seeing patterns and things that are objectively not all that similar or is that really a pattern? And if so, what is it that causes dragon imagery to arise spontaneously in so many different cultures around the world. Yeah, I mean you can also tie in just the serpentine aspect of it. I mean, obviously there are a lot of world servants in mythologies, and there's a lot to be said about our basically, our our encoded response to the

side of a snake. Um, if if cats had a god of the sky they worshiped, perhaps it would be a what is it a cucumber with wings in the sky. Uh. And again I yeah, we don't want to over generalize things, but I feel like there are certain creatures of the Earth that humans have a natural heightened response to. And then add you know, several thousand years worth of myth building and world building on top of that, and you

get some curious forms. Well, yeah, I wonder if this goes back to something we talked about, like in our the First Monster episode, where we discussed the idea what types of animal forms would become most embedded in review eared in human consciousness, and you would tend to assume it might be something like an apex predator or some animal representing danger, but then also bringing in qualities that

we associate with, like intelligence and human characteristics. But also just a minute ago, I think you mentioned something about the cyclical nature of of the world and of time. I figured that had something to do with with the ancient Mesoamerican theology we're talking about here, right, Yeah, The belief system in ancient Mexico is one in which you had various ages that had preceded our own. Each fallen

age was ruled over by an appropriate god. So we at ages of water, ages of fire, each ended by disharmony between the forces that must otherwise exist in balance. And these were not strictly moral dimensions of good versus evil, but forces apparently more akin to Eastern models of yin and yang um. Though there is a timeless struggle at the heart of this, and it is I think very easy to categorize the two players in it into sort of a good versus evil interpretation. But then again that's

our Western minds approaching it too right. You might want to put things in the familiar categories and say you've got God and the devil, but it's not quite that case with what Ketzelkadal and tes Catlee PoCA. Yes, tes catlet PoCA, whose name apparently means smoking mirror, referring to the obsidian mirrors used in worship. That's so good, So it's essentially he's essentially the god of the Black mirror Um.

Interestingly enough, that black Mirror came up in an episode that Christian and I did on John d the the the English Um really polymath but also sorcerer. He had a mirror that that originated in South America or Mesoamerica. What did he use it for? Well, magic, of course, right, if you're gonna have a an obsidian mirror of of test Catlet PoCA of you're gonna be better be using it from magic. But anyway, these these two beings that they created the world, It's said, by tearing apart a

primordial Earth goddess. The world was created from the parts of her body out of remorse from the two gods for the the for her unfortunate death, and they also

created man and woman. Um there's an interesting little story where um quetzo Quaddle himself has to has to make a regular pilgrimage into the land of the Dead, into Michlin, and there he has to complete a series of trials for its king and queen so that they'll let him bring the old bones of the dead back up to the surface and then use their ground up substance to create the next generation of humans. Yeah, and uh and

and again. In this we see you know, some models here that are present elsewhere in the world, and we're reminded of, you know, the harrowing of Hell or or the descents into the underworld in in the Greek mythology, maybe ice A and o Sirius. Yeah, yeah, this is his story as old as human time anyway. On top of this, um uh Quetzokado is also a culture bringer, so he we associated with architecture, art, and the sacred calendar.

Yet another theme we see in religions all throughout the world the the this ancient figure figure from the gods bringing knowledge or customs or culture cultural practices to the humans. Now, according to the Johnson um Quatso Kaddle was a major object of worship from around two hundred to nine hundred sea in the urban center of teoti Wakin, a city

of Mesoamerican pyramids and some two hundred thousand residents. So the toll texts would inherit this city and dominate Mexico through the twelfth century, and worship of Katskatdo really took off in the tenth century when we have this case whether the myth really melded with his tree. He became associated with a cultural hero named say A Coddle told Pilsen and so so you get this idea that told Piltson, this historic figure, by some estimates like the the oldest

historical figure uh in Mexico. Uh. He becomes merge. We we end up merging Getzok Waddle and to Pilsen into a single entity. He becomes the incarnation of the feathered God. And in doing this, to Piltson becomes a spiritual figure of peace uh. And in doing so he all alienates the more militaristic segments of society that don't want to give up human sacrifice and war, two things that to Piltson is opposed to saying, you know, hey, maybe we don't need to be at constant war with our neighbors.

Maybe we don't need to sacrifice human beings. Maybe we can just sacrifice I think it's like butterflies and lizards and whatnot as opposed to to to humans. Uh and uh, And I have to point out and and he's retelling this tale because Rudolpho and I is retelling, really is

concerned with this incarnation of cats cooddle. He does a great he has a great way of characterizing this in a very believable way, not a xenophobic, barbarian approach, where you where you'd be like, oh, one guy saying let's not kill everybody, of course, let's do something peaceful instead. You know, he's he's putting in a form that feels very modern in some respects where where the opposing king is saying, look, I mean human sacrifices. What we do.

We have to have armies, we have to have firm borders, we need to expand and get more farmland, we have to have war, and uh and uh to Piltson is standing in opposition to that, So it represents chaos right, often peace is represented as chaos. Yeah, so he's a major threat to the establishment. So the story goes that the king conspires with three sorcerers to deal with Piltson, and one this is the militaristic king. Yes, and one of the sorcerers is none other than Ketsok Waddle's arch enemy,

uh Tescotli PoCA in human form. So they end up using a black mirror to tempt to pelts and uh they corrupt and in doing so, they corrupt him and make him fully carnal, so he like loses his god nature. Yeah, it's like a gradual thing, Like they show him the mirror and he sees himself and becomes a little vain, and uh, then there's a you know, an additional level. I think it's so very very much like a rule of three type thing. And eventually they bring about his

downfall and he's you know, fully carnal. And after that he he he has been defeated. He lays in a stone coffin for four days and then he emerges. He departs on a raft of snakes, and then he emolates himself and the ashes become rainbow colored birds that ascend into the sky, and in doing so ketsok waddle Uh passes away from the earth, but he promises to return, however, to to reincarnate at some point in the future in the year say a Coddle Uh. And this is the

the Aztec calendar. Okay, So the result of this though, Uh. And then again we have the situation where the myth and the history are are entangled. But to Pilsen, the individual Uh is brought down and society ends up splittering, splintering, and then the in doing so, the toll Tech dynasty crumbles. Uh. But he remains a messianic figure, driven out in Diosgrace, dying in exile, but prophesies to return. Well, that is

a great story. It makes me want to read this book by h. This is this is all from the Rudolpho and I a book. Yes, Like I said that, the introductions fabricst in the book itself is wonderful too. It's short, it's a short read, so I recommend it. Yeah, I've got to check that out. But I guess we need to take a quick break and then when we

come back we can explore more about this story. All right, we're back, alright, so we started off by talking about kind of kind of the crude version of the plumed serpent idea as it as it appears in say, slimy

b movies from the early eighties. And then we got into the idea of quetzel Coadal is actually this magnificent god from Mesoamerican religion, and Robert you told the story from from this excellent sounding book about quetzel coadls uh coming down to embody this character in in the History of the Empire, and how how all that played out when the hero was betrayed and exiled, and the idea that he might return. So let's pick up from there.

All right, well, let's let's jump right in. So one of the issues here is that so far we've been discussing quetzo Coaddle in a pre Columbian since and we say pre Columbian America's were of course talking about before the arrival of Columbus, before the arrival of of the various western colonial powers, the colonial invaders that would subjugate the both continents. And so when this we come to uh, an idea we've discussed on the show before, and that

is UH, the idea of an outside context problem. Now, this was a term coined by the late sci Fi author E. N. M. Banks to describe a problem faced by a civilization um that that has no ability to prepare for or scarcely comprehend the problem they're faced with. An o CPS is when they refer to it is often fatal. In most societies or civilizations only ever encounter

one of them. The most common example is one civilization suddenly encountering another civilization of far greater technological power, such as humans encountering an alien species that can travel between the stars. But a less extreme version of this, of course, could simply be encountering a civilization has much more advanced

weapons of war. Exactly, for example, beings that are encased in iron and traverse the entire oceans and great wooden vessels and capture the power of wind to do so, whose weapons pierced the air like thunder, and whose very very bodies exude a creeping death that cannot be stopped. Uh. And in this we have the conquistadors. We have the armies of her non Cortes, the conquerors of the Spanish

Empire that arrived in Mesoamerica. And of course we know that the European colonial invaders brought more than one kind of warfare. It wasn't just the explicit technologies was like steel, armor and swords and guns and stuff. It was also biological warfare. So in the case of the Spanish arriving in meso America, this is obviously a situation where there was a lot of destruction, a lot of cultural descripted destruction. This was a catastrophic event for the peoples of the Americas.

So we mentioned the year, say a Coddle earlier, the the year that uh Quetzo ku Waddle was prophesied to return. So that year, that year ends up rolling around once more, and by Western measure, this the year fifteen nineteen. This

was the year as well that Cortez arrived. No, so you can understand the confusion, right Uh you look and you say, well, here, surely this is quetzoquad returned to claim his throne, attended to by an unnatural army and arriving on what was described as perhaps floating mountains or even the four mythic temples of quetsok Waddle. Interesting, now, I had heard before the idea that when I say Cortez and his armies arrived, that that they were perceived

as gods. And I didn't know if that was actually historically true or historically likely, or if maybe that was like an untrue rumor or Spanish tale. Do you have do you have a sense of whether that's actually historically accurate? Well, it seems to be. There seems again we don't have complete knowledge of everything I went down, but there do seem to be a few different ways of interpreting this

from what I've seen so far. So you're dealing primarily with UH, with the the ruler makte Zuma the second sometimes referred to monte Zuma and UH. And so he's he sees this, he sees what's happening, he sees the Spanish that have arrived. And you could say that either oh well, he and his people think there are gods, or perhaps just the the the weirdness of this is enough to make them hesitate. You don't know how to RESPONCD. They didn't know how to respond. Yeah, I mean that's

the problem of an outside context. Problem is that you have no context for it, and therefore you don't have a response. Uh, and readily available at hand. Wisdom is often prudence holding back and you know, not acting hastily, right, So, and you also have other factors at work here. We

mentioned that the disease factor. You also have the fact that the invaders are fairly quick to align themselves with the enemies of the Aztecs, Like they doesn't take them long to figure out like what are the power dynamics and how they can exploit the situation. And however it ends up exactly playing out. It's clear that, you know, the Aztec empires is toppled within two years years uh

makta Zuma the second becomes a mere prisoner. But there wasn't There's another interpretation of events here that I thought was fascinating, and that is that Montezuma the Second uh was apparently you know, he's worried by the portents of doom and in the typical mode of rulers, somewhat paranoid about plots against him. And then he meets Cortez and his Spanish retinue, who were you know, also in awe of this great city. Uh, and they're also that that

would be to nok Titlain. Yes, and there and again they've aligned themselves with with enemies of the Aztec Empire and so he ends up presenting Cortes with quote the treasure of Quatzokuadle. Okay, so, markte Zuma presents Cortes with like a a religiously significant piece of raimond a costume, And as explored briefly in Robert Draper's National Geographic Magazine article Unbearing the aztec Uh, it's possible too that monte Zoom of the second was quote cunningly outfitting Cortez in

the godly garment of the soon to be sacrificed. So again, he doesn't really get into this a lot in this article, but think back again to the The Rise and Fall of Ketso Kwaddle. Ketzoku Waddle is a king prophesies to return, but also a king whose very story is one of

sacrifice and death. So perhaps the idea is that montag Zuma was maybe not so much a fly trapped in the web of symbols and myth, but a spider trying one last clever trick to ensnare his enemy within the trappings of symbol and myth, to turn the people against him by essentially laying a trap of religious belief. Interesting. I wasn't able to find much else on this this

read this theory, but I find that fascinating. It reminds me of our our episode on ritual regicide, the idea that that even rulers can be trapped within this, uh, this myth cycle of death and rebirth. Yeah, I haven't thought about that episode much recently, but that was a really interesting one. You know, we talked about all the

traditions of the sacrifice of the king. You often think of the king sacrificing like you know, other people captured enemies or whatever, but sometimes occupying a position of glory also puts a target on you, even a even a sacred or religious target. Yeah, so that's that's an interesting read. In this scenario, obviously that plan, if that was the plan, did not work. So what happens after an outside context problem? Will you end up with a struggle for cultural survival? Um?

I mean that's kind of in a way the best case scenario, assuming you're not just completely destroyed decimated by the encounter and uh. One of the methods by which the old ways may be preserved is within the new. And we see this tradition of merging the idea of Ketzokadal with the apostle St. Thomas from Christian trade editions, who is said to have traveled far preaching the Gospel.

And you see this and this is you know, after the fact, this is certainly more and say the uh, the seventeenth century, but you see this merging of iconography and identity where you have the plumid serpent God essentially crossed over with this Christian apostle. And by the seventeenth century, writers and priests began to make more of these comparisons, and the trend ended up dying back down in the

nineteenth century. But but it's but it's it's fascinating to look at how these two figures became once more, ketzo Quaddle became associated merge with a historic individual. You know, I'm tempted to think that, I know, the members of the Church Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints believe that Jesus himself came and preached in the America's right. Yeah, exactly. And so you you do see this trend within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints of some

individuals reinterpreting Ketzokuaddle as Jesus Christ. This, oddly enough, though, I have to point out, has no connection to the so called Jesus lizard of southern Mexico and Central America. Creatures that also bear the name of our previous topic, the basilists, right, the basilist lizards that can run on top of the water. Apparently I have nothing to do with quetzel kattle. Yeah, they're they're real lizards as opposed to mythological snake guy. Now, speaking of reptiles, lizards, snakes,

all all that kind of stuff. One of the other avenues we wanted to explore, the idea of the plumed serpent in is stepping out of the specific religious context of keutzel Coatl himself, also getting away from the weird Larry co and monster version and looking at biology. So, Robert, do you want to go to a mental place with me to close your eyes and imagine. Imagine you're wandering

through the jungle in Malaysia. In one nearby tree, you notice a snake with a speckled body of black, green and gold climbing vertically up the trunk of the tree. And it uses it's the scales on its underbelly to sort of grip the bark and slowly make its way up the tree, and eventually it forks off of the main trunk to explore a branch, and you wonder, what's it doing up there? Is it looking for something? Maybe it's looking for a bird's nest to raid or a

sleeping bat to eat. And it doesn't find anything on the branch, but it keeps following the branch farther and farther out, and you're like, where's it going. There's not that much branch there, right, And then it goes all the way to the tip of the branch and there's just nothing nowhere left for it to go. Why is it doing that? And you might be wondering this when suddenly the snake coils its head off the branch and kind of a hanging j shape, and then it dives

straight off the branch, straight in your direction. So obviously you might flinch and take cover right because the snake just doves straight at you. But then you realize it's not stick. Its path is not following a straight line.

It's actually not diving straight at you at all, because immediately after the snake leaves the branch, it stops plunging down at a sharp angle and begins to gliding smoothly through the air and a kind of horizontal pattern as its body undulates in an S shape, and then finally it lands in another tree branch high above your head, in a different tree. You have just watched a snake fly. And these snakes are real. This would I can I

can see, this would be a very alarming thing. Because again, if we have an innate fear of snakes and in all late well, and even if not a fear, at least a hyper awareness to them, like realizing that snakes can pose a risk to our mortality. And then here's one flying through the air like they they should not be able to do. They should be creatures of the ground,

and this one is seemingly a creature of the air. Yeah, I mean, it's it's the thing that should not be You could not blame someone for reacting with horror and all. But one thing I should be clear about immediately is that these types of snakes, I believe they are venomous, but not especially venomous, so they're not really dangerous to humans. I mean, generally we don't want to promote snake fear of any kind, but these especially, they're they're not really

dangerous humans. So there are five species of snake in the genus Chrysopelia, native to South and Southeast Asia, including countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South China, Vietnam, Cambodia, loose in other places, generally southern and Southeast Asia. They generally grow up to about one point two meters or about four feet long. And Chrysopelia are the flying snakes, or

perhaps more appropriately the gliding snakes. Because you've got to make that important distinction, I would say usually the way we use the word flying means to travel horizontally through the air on your own power. You know, it's self powered flight in a way that can theoretically continue gaining altitude, whereas gliding is using existing momentum. The momentum you've already got to travel horizontally through the air without losing altitude

too fast. Airplanes fly, hang, gliders glide, and these snakes glide. So on average, these snakes can cover a horizontal distance of about ten or about thirty three ft from a branch at a starting height of about nine meters or about twenty nine point five feet. Some reports have them flying much farther. I read a National Geographic article that claimed they've been known to glide up to a hundred meters horizontally, but I couldn't determine the source of that claim.

It seems kind of nuts, but maybe you know, we can take it. So in order to fly like that, obviously the snakes they can't flap their wings. They don't have wings. So what do they do? How do you generate the lift to glide like that? And the answer is, instead of flapping their wings, they turn their whole body into a wing. So wings work, and this would be the simple version, by guiding air flow in such a

way as to generate lift. And generally they do this by trying to form a relatively flat, horizontal surface under which air can flow and push the flying object up against gravity. So if you're a snake and you want to turn your snake body into a wing or a pseudo wing, one thing you'd probably want to do is make yourself as flat and as wide as possible, and

that's exactly what they do. So in recent years, a few studies, often associated with a Virginia tech biologist named Jake Soca, have captured and analyzed high speed video of the flying snakes, and also made digital and physical models based on these analyzes to understand how they glide from tree to tree, and what they found is that these snakes can literally splay their own ribs out to the sides and flatten their body into a semiconcave cross section.

So imagine a snake. You know, you normally imagine the skeleton of a snake has got a backbone and then kind of a circle of ribs forming almost a cylinder, right, So imagine that C shape of the ribs. Instead spreading out like a bird opening its wings, the ribs spread out kind of flat, and in doing this, the snake can basically double its width. But then it also undulates in an S shape as it glides with waves traveling down the length of the body, and this also helps

keep it aloft. So the whole process begins with a ballistic dive where the snake reaches off of the off of the branch, spreads its ribs and goes flat, gathers its body into an S shape, and then it begins to wriggle the S shape in large amplitude undulations. And this process allows the snake, instead of falling straight toward the ground, to glide an angle of about fifteen degrees to about thirty five degrees until it floats down at

its target destination. Speaking to the BBC for an article, Soka characterized it as sort of like the animal is swimming in air. I could see where that just seeing something like that would open the door from mystical interpretations. Yeah, you've gotta wonder if somebody saw that in ancient times, how would they not come up with some kind of dragon based on it or something. Now, of course, this is not This is not something that you would find

in Mesoamerica. So we're not saying that this snake inspired the Cutzel Coadal story or anything like that. But you can see how similar ideas of flying serpents plumed serpents might be inspired by something like this. Now, of course, every article about this research also mentions, Robert, can you guess what it also mentions in the very last paragraph of every one of these articles, snakes on a plane? No, what will we use this knowledge of analyzing snake flight

to do? Oh? Yes, well, that's that's the closing of any good science article, right, What are the practical applications? Build robots? Always says, build robots. There's so many of these. I wish we could just get more science articles that say, you know what, it's just great to study snakes, and they don't have to justify it at the end by saying we will use this knowledge one day to build weapons snakes that fly into enemy territory in ways you

can't possibly imagine. Well, But at the same time, I do understand that, you know you you want to end on a really strong aw note with the science article and and and off times. That's the future applications, that's where you find that gold. But these snakes themselves inspire all. Look this up. Watch the video as imagine this is a snake flying. I mean it's not it's not gaining out, but it's gliding tree to tree. It's it's amazing to see. This is what's all inspiring. Not to knock people who

make robots. Making robots is great. I didn't mean to come off overly strong there. I'm all, I'm all for robots, but come on, you don't have to justify it by making robots. You could just study snakes and that'd be great. I can get behind that. One more thing, of course, to mention is that there are of course also flying lizards. Again, if you want to go in the sort of flying

reptile direction. Again, this would be gliding, not flying. But the draco lizards of the Draco genus are also found in Southeast Asia, and they've got rib flaps that fold up against the body when not in use, but they can be spread out to form a wing and allow the lizard to glide between trees. Now, the thing I was wondering is why would snakes and lizards need to glie between trees? What's useful about that? And so there

I think there are a couple of hypotheses. One is that once you're already up in a tree and you want to get in another tree, it might take less energy to glide to another tree than to climb down and climb back up. That makes sense. But then the other thing, that maybe the bigger thing, is that crossing the forest floor exposes you to large predators. The forest floor is the danger zone. Once you're up in a tree,

you're safer. So once you are in the safety of a tree, it would be much better if you could glide from tree to tree instead of having to go back down across the forest floor and maybe get picked up by a leopard along the way. Now, this might not be a factor, but it also seems like if something were perhaps following you or stalking you. Um, you know, this is a great way to escape them. From one tree to the other. You can glide and it can't if there's a monkey in the tree that wants to

eat you. You know, you can glide farther than that monkey can jump potentially. Yeah, though some of those monkeys can jump. Right, all right, we need to take a quick break. When when we come back, we will discuss the key of the beastly flyers of the ancient past, the pterosaurs. Than all right, we're back, Robert, take me to the pterosaurs. All right, Well, we're talking about one

particular terras, so we're all familiar with pterosaurs. I think at this point these are the the flying creatures of the prehistoric world, the flying lizards of the prehistoric world, not dinosaurs, right, not dinosaurs. You call him dinosaur, your

six year old will correct you. Um, I have I have had this happened before, because sometimes that you do just sort of like a like a like non scientifically, you just refer to everything from the dinosaur age as a dinosaur, and uh, yeah, it's inaccurate to call everything a dinosaur. So the the king or one of the kings of the of the pterosaurs was undisputably a creature that is that now bears the name Ketsokadalus, and you'll never guess what he's named. He's an himed after Ketsoquaddle,

the the the meso American snake god. Robert. You actually did a reading from a children's book on the podcast one time that had a great little, you know, sub story about Ketzel Coatless and it ended with this this,

I am Ketzel Coatlas. Yes, I forget the author's name offhand, but if you do a search for I am Ketzo Coatless or I am I think there's one on Diplodocus as well, but they're all, like really, they're all really good children's books about dinosaurs that do not candy coat the life and death nature of of a of a prehistar creature's life. So we're talking about as far as Ketzkatless goes. We're talking about the Cretaceous period, and we're talking about the region that is now known as North America.

First fossils were discovered in Texas in the early nineteen seventies, and this this creature was apparently just a flying monster. This thing was incredibly huge. Uh. The estimated wingspan, and this is something that's changed over the years, that was higher than they kind of kind of scaled back, but current data seems to put it estimated at around thirty three to thirty six ft or ten to eleven meters.

That's roughly the wingspan of a mid sized airplane. For instance, Uh, the World War two US fighter P fifty one Mustang that had a wingspan of thirty seven ft or eleven point twenty eight ms. The swept wing span of an F FOURT Team Tomcat. That's the uh, the fighter plane from top gun for anybody who can make that connection, Uh, that has a swept wingspan of thirty eight feet or eleven point fifty five What has swept me? So the the F fourteen can fly with its wings in a

swept position or in an extended position. I see when when it becomes sort of streamlined. Yeah, okay, Yeah. There was a great g I Joe toy airplane that was essentially an F fourteen, uh, and it had wings that moved like that. That's my main connection with it. So compared to other things that fly and have wings. This thing was an absolute beast, absolutely. I mean, even if

it's on the ground, this was a huge creature. So in a bipedal stance, it would have stood roughly three meters or nine point eight feet tall, and it may have scrambled around and like this kind of quadripue quadropedal stance. However, much like a bat. Have you ever seen it? Um? Bats crawled, bats crawl or some of the I think there's creepy. Look, it's creepy. Yeah, there's one particular I believe there's even one particular species of bad it's primary

primarily ground based. Uh, and it is. It's kind of creepy to look at. So this thing might have scrambled around like that, But by many estimates, including Ruta and bent On in Evolution of morpheological Disparity in Terra Sours from two thousand eleven, this mighty flying beast would have probably stood roughly as tall as a modern day giraffe, but with just a far larger head. Yeah, kind of like giraffe with with like a screwed up lizard like

pelican head. Yeah, like this great squatting winged beast. Just imagine that thing looming over you. I feel like this thing should be right up there with the Tarandosaurus rex. You know, people should appreciated them on the same level. Yeah, I mean, I really, it's it's amazing. It is. I mean, it's it's I mean, certainly all the terosaurs are amazing creatures. To look back on this, this evolved mode of flying that that again is is a little bit different from

from birds or bats. It is like we have essentially three modes of vertebrate flight that evolved, and this is one of them. And that's talking about powered flight, not correct. Uh, you know, and thinking about this, you know, like again, it would have it would have seemed like a god if you were able to see it. And uh, I can't help but think of Edgar Rice Burrows. Uh pellucidar I believe is the pronunciation. Uh, a series of books

that's a setting that he did them. I haven't haven't either, but I was introduced to them just by some of the art. Initially, they feature a psychic master race of flying reptiles called the Mahars, and they pop up. They also pop up in the nineteen seventies six movie At the Earth's Core starring Peter Cushing. Yes, Doug McClure, oh boy, and Caroline Monroe. Wow, I've got to see that. How

have I not? Well, I'll tell you. It's actually one of the movies in the most recent Mystery Science Theater three thousands serially season, So that all star cast, that all star cast. If you want to see see Peter Cushing just totally misused in a film, this is a great place to find it. Peter Cushing was misused in about nine percent of the films he was in, but this one especially because you got Doug McClure in there to play kind of a goofus, which he did well.

I love Doug McClure. Yeah, he's the classic mid century movie lug. Yeah. But then Peter Cushing also kind of plays a dufus, so it's I think he's a scientist dufus. And then you have like two different levels of dufus going up against stuff forces they can how should comprehend How sharp are his cheekbones in it? Does he cut anything with them? I don't know. They might have been dulling a bit by that point, I have to say, But but he's still it's still Peter Cushing, So it's

still a lot of fun. But you have these kind of wretched looking Terra Sar mahar Uh creatures that show up in the film. There's also a I think it's a Boris file a Jo painting that was done for one of these book covers that has a of course, like a scantily clad woman, uh. And there's this terrace star creature, one of these Mahars creeping up on her to snatch her away, because you know, it's Edgar Rice Burrows.

That's that's kind of the plot. And I can't help but assume that the Mahars also inspired the Savage Land Mutants saw On from the X Men comics. Not saar On from Lord of the Rings, but the what is essentially like a Terra Saar human ooid that the Mutants battle in those comic books. Okay, so what else do

we know out this creature, the quetzal Katlas? All right, Well, in a way, it's fitting that the creature is named for a god with so much mystery around it, because a lot of mystery remains surrounding this massive, winged prehistoric creature. And this, of course is part of the course with fossil remains, paleontologists have to solve the riddle of the

remains as best they can. We have all these you know, massive gaps in the in the in the fossil record, and that's just part of trying to understand the past through fossils. We have, I think, based on I think current data, we have I think only one adult Quetzo katlas fossil to go off of, and it's only wing fragments. The other specimens have been like smaller, like younger um specimens.

So we we've seen a wide range of estimates than regarding the flying or gliding abilities of the Ketzo katlas, a creature with more of an inland range than many of its flying relatives, So we don't know exactly. We don't know for sure to what extent it flew exactly. For instance, Donald M. Henderson went so far in his two thousand nine Journal Vertebrate Paleontology article to wonder if it could fly at all. He argued that given its

estimated body mass, this was maybe a flightless creature. Oh yeah, it might be like the ostrich of pterosaurs or something. Um. Yeah, you always have to wonder, because I mean, so there are limits on the size that an organism could reasonably be expected to fly. Right. You know, you might wonder like how come dragons don't exist? What why don't we see birds with a hundred foot wingspan? And I think part of that has to do with like how how

mass scales up with relationship to volume. Right, Like, one of the reasons you can't get super giant creatures is that would be cooling problems with like the surface area of the giant creature, how much stuff it's got inside it um And you would probably encounter similar problems when you keep trying to scale up bigger and bigger flying organism. As the mass keeps going up, it's going to take more and more power to lift that mass off the ground.

And you know, well you can. You can generate lift in multiple ways. You can have bigger wings, but eventually, like you'd run into structural problems like where bones would not be strong enough to support the wings at a certain amount of you know, size and weight. Or you could have more powerful muscles to flap them harder and faster, but eventually you might run into fuel problems. I mean, they're just physics limits on how big a flying organism

can get. And you know, I have to say that a flightless catsl co outless is terrifying in its own way, because here it would be a situation where here's a creature that is like I don't have to fly anymore because I'm enormous, and I will just eat you with my toothless beak. I would just gobble you up. I mean, I want this is not based on evidence, is just speculating.

I wonder if you could also imagine something like a chicken, where it's not a flying bird, but it's a bird that can sort of like use wings to it off the ground for a short period of time. I mean you wonder about like maybe it doesn't sustain flight, but it's sort of like hops up and flies very briefly

in order to swoop down and pounce something. Right, But this is not the only argument that you have the the other end of the spectrum, For instance, where a British paleontologist Mark Witten, working with biomechanics researcher Mike Habib, modeled the creature in two and argued that he could fly up to eighty miles an hour or a hundred and twenty eight kilometers per hour for seven to ten days at altitudes of fifteen thousand feet or four point

six kilometers, with a maximum range of between eight thousand and twelve thousand miles. That's up to nineteen thousand, three hundred and twelve kilometers. Wow, so that's some range. Yeah, that is so if you're a flint stone and you want to ride a dinosaur for like a for a transoceanic flight, this is the one you want to snag. You know, it's not a dinosaur, sorry, a pterosaur quetzo koitles air. But then we also have more balanced to

pro just falling in between these two. For instance, paleobiologist David Unwin believes that the creatures could certainly fly, but we don't really have a lot else to go on. Again, think to the limited fossils we talked about earlier. He argues that the distance estimates here might be just premature.

It's also been argued in some of these models that the creature, if it could fly, you know, it could probably get aloft via a high powered four legged pounce into the air, which I have to say that is alone is just amazing to try and envision, imagine this massive dump truck of a creature just launching into the air. And then flapping like crazy and uh, descending a winged giraffe with a giant pelican head, leaping into the clouds and then once it's once it's up or or once

it lands again, the question is, well, what does it eat? Well, one theory the answer is you, well, yes, if we were, if we were around, that would that would probably be a possibility. But one theory was that it was a scavenger and it used its long beak to like dig into dino corpses, which would also seem to work given their inland range. You know, so this is not a thing that's going out and needing a lot of sea creatures. But perhaps it's flying over vast distances and encountering dead

dinosaurs and it can go down and feast. Uh. And of course flying is an attractive foraging strategy for scavengers, right, Yeah, you have a tremendous ability to to take in the surrounding the region. But they also could have skimmed fish from freshwater lakes and rivers. That's one theory, but it's also been pointed out that they likely lacked the next

structure and jaw to really carry that out. A more likely hypothesis apparently is that they fed much like a modern stork, stalking shorelines for large and small prey alike. And uh, I have to say that that is a terrifying possibility, because if you've ever seen footage of storks engaging in this sort of terrestrial hunting practice, uh, it

can be it can be pretty horrifying. I accidentally showed some footage from a documentary I want to say it was a Disney's Flamingo documentary, uh, to my son, and he was younger at the time, and there's a scene where the stork just is stalking the shore and gobbling up live flamingo chicks. Yeah, it's it's absolutely horrifying. After he saw that, uh, there was some some later point we'd forgotten about it, and then we tried to show him a cartoon that has, you know, the typical like

stork and baby motif. It might have been in one of the Pixar shorts, and he was instantly not having any of it. He's like, I know what storks are about, and you're not going to show me this this, uh, this short film that involves human babies and storks, because I know what's going to happen that baby is gonna get gobbled. No. I mean we we try to present a level headed view of predation in nature, but sometimes you just do have a visceral emotional reaction. And I

know exactly what you're talking about. I haven't seen storks, but I've seen video of UM. I believe it's in U some David Attenborough near rated documentary UM that had not storks but pelicans eating baby birds. Just horrifying. Watch it. Like the way they don't blink, They just got these big lower beak areas and they just scoop up the baby birds in and they're like wings and legs poking out of their mouth and stuff. Is just horrible, frightful.

So I'm sorry, now I shouldn't apply that moralistic tone to nature, but like it. It is hard to watch. But here's the question with the quetzo quatless. Would it be able to scoop sunbathers up from a New York rooftops. I would say probably not. I think it would need to land in Central Park where it would still have plenty to eat. It could attack picnickers and like young people making out on blankets. Um, you know, school groups that have arrived there to play soccer, whatnot. There's so

much to eat in Central Park. Hey, we've seen pizza at now you get pizza ketsel coatlas exactly, just the junk food. It doesn't need to even deal with live pray. All right. Well, as we begin to close thing is out here, I do want to mention that there there, Ketzo Quaddle has has survived to a certain extent or re emerged in culture. It hasn't been like the complete second Coming that was perhaps prophesized, but he remains a figure of interest, and sometimes you actually see physical, like

new physical manifestations of him. There's a really cool Ketzo Quaddle statue in San Jose, California, for instance. I have not seen it in person yet, but I was reading about it on Atlice Obscura and it points out that it's downtown, it's very Aztecan style, and it was controversial back in the nineties as it cost about half a million dollars. And also some Christian fundamentalists claimed that this was this was gonna be a place of where you know,

people were gonna worship a bloodthirsty god. Oh yeah. They were saying that they were going to be human sacrifices. The statue, which, of course, based on everything we've discussed regarding this god, that was not going to be the case, or if it us, it would have been very misinformed cultist showing up there. Meanwhile, other critics just argued that it was a religious sculpture on public grounds and then shouldn't be allowed. But then there's the criticism that they

say that the sculpture kind of looks like coiled dog poop. Well, I guess coiled serpents sometimes do. Yeah. Well, it's pointed out on Atlas Obscura, and there is no author attributed on this particular article. The positioning here isn't crazy, especially when you look at some of the architectural motifs of

say the Aztecs of Quetzo, kadal Uh and Uh. It also matches up with this description that of the God that D. H. Lawrence made in his ninety six novel The Plume Serpent, where he describes quote, snakes coiled like excrements, snakes feigned and feathered beyond all dreams of dread. I

have not ventured into that D. H. Lawrence book. Lawrence's novel, by the way, concerns the Mexican Revolution and a cult attempting to revive the older legion of Mexico, and he apparently wanted to title the book Quetzo Quaddle, but his publishers disagreed. I can see why, like nobody's going to be able to pronounce that. Well, it's probably one of the reasons. Probably Larry Cohen's film was called Q or

Q The Wing Serpent, Right. Yeah. One other point of possible interest, I haven't wait, wait a minute, do you think that Larry Cohen's movie was in any way based on the D. H. Lawrence novel. I have not read anything to suggest that it was, um and I would say that no, it's probably not, but in it maybe maybe so in a very Larry Cohen kind of way, like you picked up on like cultists bringing back an old religion. Let's get a giant monster in there, and

you've got a movie. On another literary note, I'm very interested to check out. I haven't read these yet, but the author Alliotte de Bodard wrote the Obsidian and Blood Trilogy, a trilogy of books that I've seen described as a like pre Columbian as tech noir. Oh that sounds cool. Yeah, So I'm I'm interested in that out and again I wanna say that an I is book that a reference at the top of the podcast is an excellently read, is an excellent read and readily available in like you know,

kindle and physical format however you like to read your books. Awesome. I think I'll be checking that one out all right. So there you have it. We've gone from B movie monsters to uh meso American gods, two prehistoric creatures, uh flying snakes. What more could you ask for? Well, you could ask for more monster science content, which we will be bringing to you for the rest of the month. That's right, you can check out all these episodes stuff to blow your mind. Dot com that's the mother ship.

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