The Culmont Pterodactyl: A Creature Blasted Out of the Rock (Haute-Marne, 1856)

January 12, 1856. La Presse grayloise, a newspaper in Gray, Haute-Saône, printed a short report. It opened with a promise. "Une découverte d'une grande importance scientifique vient d'être faite sur le territoire de Culmont (Haute-Marne)." The setting was a railway tunnel, one said to be meant to unite the Saint Dizier and Nancy railways.

Workmen cutting through the rock blasted apart an enormous block of Lias limestone. Inside was a cavity, and from it, the report said, came "a living being of monstrous form." It was weak. It moved its wings, gave a hoarse cry and died. The hollow in the stone, so the story went, matched the shape of its body, as if the animal had grown in the rock.

The creature was the size of a large goose, with wings spanning three metres, twenty two centimetres. Four long limbs were joined by a flight membrane and ended in long hooked talons. It had "a very long neck, and a mouth filled with sharp teeth." Its skin was livid black, naked, thick and oily. Its intestines held only a colourless liquid like water.

The body was taken to Gray. There a naturalist "well-versed in the study of paleontology" gave it a name. Pterodactylus anas, a species whose fossil remains had been found in the strata geologists call Lias. No one recorded the naturalist's name. No one named the workmen either. The body never entered any collection.

February 4, 1856. The Morning Chronicle in London ran an English translation and added an editorial note. The specimen, it said, belonged to the "genus Canard". Five days later the Illustrated London News printed the story on page 166 under the Hamlet line "Very Like a Whale." The Journal de Toulouse followed on February 11, and it later surfaced, told with scepticism, in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, and in a footnote by Collin de Plancy.

The clue was in the name. Anas is Latin for duck. In French, a duck is a canard, which is also the word for a false news story. In Magonia in December 1985, Mick Goss called it a layered Victorian joke, arguing that Victorian readers would have caught the wordplay while modern "Amazing Mysteries" books repeated it as fact. Even the anatomy, naked skin included, reflected 1850s ideas about pterosaurs.

TalkOrigins offered another reading. French gentlemen geologists, it suggested, invented the tale to answer German successes with Solnhofen fossils. It noted that Pterodactylus was robin-sized and called the story "ridiculous on its face." The rivalry theory has problems of its own. The report names the Lias, not the Late Jurassic beds of Solnhofen, and Archaeopteryx was only found in 1861. The railway is odd too. Saint Dizier and Nancy lie well north of Culmont. Who wrote the original piece remains unknown.

The pterodactyl of Culmont would not stay buried. It appeared in John Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space in 1975. Hunt Emerson drew it as a comic strip for Fortean Times. Creationist writers took it up, beginning with Carl E. Baugh's Panorama of Creation in 1989, and rebuttals followed, among them Glen J. Kuban's "Living pterodactyls?" in 2005. In 2019 Karl Shuker returned to it on his ShukerNature blog.

Some English retellings add that the body crumbled to dust. The French text, as summarised, does not say so. The story also belongs to the older genre of entombed-animal tales, including reports of toads found alive in stone.