The “Imaginary Pterosaur” Artist, Helder da Rocha and his peek into Rio Ptero 2013

Helder da Rocha builds pterosaurs. Lots of them!
And you can read all about them at his blog, The Imaginary Pterosaur at WordPress.com.

Figure 1. Helder da Rocha, a wonderful pterosaur sculptor and blogger.

In his own words
“Helder da Rocha is a nomadic computer scientist, traveller, writer, actor, musician and visual artist who lives (most of the time) in São Paulo, Brazil. Some of his other works can be found in this Flickr gallery or in his personal website. He can be contacted via email (helder dot darocha at gmail dot com) or Facebook.“

South America in the Early Cretaceous
The home of many of the most spectacular pterosaurs of all time is Brazil and da Rocha is right where he needs to be to access these wonders of the Early Cretaceous. Brazil was also home for the third pterosaur symposium, Rio Ptero 2013.

Rio Ptero 2013 Exhibitor
Da Rocha was an exhibitor at Rio Ptero 2013 and provided many wonderful photos (Fig. 2) of the symposium at his blogsite. There’s even a YouTube video of the event. Well worth seeing! Here are several of da Rocha’s pterosaur skeleton sculptures, centerpieces for the Rio Pterosaur art show.

Figure 2. Pterosaur bone sculptures by Helder da Rocha as centerpieces for Rio Ptero 2013.

Da Rocha also exhibited at the First Brazilian Dinosaur Symposium with more images of his work here.

Beginning with Guidraco
Inspired by the skull-only pterosaur Guidraco (Fig. 3), da Rocha set out to imagine the rest of it. Hence the title of his blog. He did pretty well. Here is his first blog post dated March 2012.

Da Rocha takes his readers through the process of building Guidraco and later, other large pterosaurs. Here (fig. 3) is the skull carved from foam at an early stage of construction.

Figure 3. Guidraco sculpture by Helder da Rocha at an early stage of construction.

Step-by-step instruction
I applaud da Rocha’s talents and efforts at creating full scale pterosaur skeletons. If you want to learn how he does it, he tells you, step-by-step in his blog.

Minor issues
I can’t agree with the way da Rocha puts a few of the bones together (for instance, he mounted Tupuxuara doing a forelimb leap with medial hands facing posteriorly, and the pteroids should be on the proximal carpals, not emerging from the preaxial carpals, fig. 4). Apparently others also had issues with his pterosaurs poses. Da Rocha reports, “I would like to thank Christopher Bennett, Darren Naish, Nathan Carroll, Ashley Poust, David Unwin and Felipe Pinheiro for pointing out inaccuracies in the assembly, which I was able to fix.” 

Be careful, Helder.
I only know a few of those names. Some of those experts have promoted a raft of falsifiable hypotheses in the past, all documented at PterosaurHeresies.Wordpress.com. The world of pterosaurs is filled with opinions based on evidence and other opinions that ignore the evidence, which is why the PterosaurHeresies blog has been created — to separate one from the other.

Figure 4. Tupuxuara by Helder da Rocha in a controversial forelimb launch pose with medial hands facing posteriorly.

Helder Da Rocha is a young man with talent,
drive and decades of creative production ahead of him. I see him as a future leader in the world of pterosaurs. His foam sculpture techniques appear to create accurate work that is lighter, cheaper and faster to create than traditional sculpture techniques.

References
Helder da Rocha’s Imaginary pterosaur blogsite