Editorial Note — The Author deposited this text with the Editors of Odonatologica on 8 July 1980. It was his objective to work it out into a proper paper at “some later time”. Due to the pressure of manyfold other work, he was not able to do so, therefore the original text is published here posthumously, as a historic document, in memory of this great odonatologist and independent thinker. His poem is set to the music of the popular Three blind mice A correlation between the atmospheric oxygen levels and air pressure on one hand, and the dragonfly size on the other is currently considered as a possibility (cf. S. BROOKS, 2003, Dragonflies, p. 9, Nat. Hist. Mus., London). If we reject the idea that dinosaur bones gradually enlarge while buried in the rocks, then we need some explanation as to how the pterosaurs flew (cf, SEELEY, 1870; MILLER, 1971;BRAMWELL& WHITFIELD, 1974; FREENEWALT/ LAWSON, 1975; DESMOND, 1975). I reject the proposal that they clambered up the mountains, fell off the top and grabbed sufficient food on the downward glide to provide energy to climb up again. This may satisfy an aerodynamicist but does not constitute a realistic ecological niche in the view of a biologist. Are we being excessively parochial, narrow-minded, unimaginative, not to say pedestrian? It is not only among pterosaurs that Nature appears to have been parsimonious in adequate provision for wing flapping. Long before Texas necessarily came up with the biggest pterosaur (LAWSON, 1975), the odonatologists had identified early forms of dragonflies with a wing length of over 300 mm (TILLYARD, 1928). These giants of the insect world could not climb up anything to glide down from because their legs were not adaptable to walking, but only to perching and grabbing food while in flight. Because they bred under water they must have flapped their wings somehow in spite of a miniscule muscular provision for so doing and a wing venation providing only a fraction of the lift available to present day forms.