Giant winged Transylvanian predators could have eaten dinosaurs | Elsa Panciroli

Welcome to the Cretaceous Romanian island of HaEeg, once populated by lifeforms stranger than anything imagined by Lovecraft or Geiger

What makes ancient, extinct animals so compelling is that they are often beyond anything we can imagine. Many of them have no comparison among the lifeforms surviving on earth today. They reached unsurpassed sizes, or were chimeric half-and-halfs. Others had alien skeletons with bodily projections and elongations that stretch credulity. There are few creatures that embody the strangeness of the extinct quite like azhdarchids.

Pronounced az-dar-kid, these giant reptiles were named after the azhdar of Iranian mythology: huge lizards with wings that populated Persian epics. Real life azhdarchids were actually pterosaurs, the group of flying reptiles most commonly recognised in the form of the head-crested Pteranodon; much beloved of scientifically dubious film and television.