I have tried my hand a time or two at composing a decent double dactyl, and George has been most patient with me. Yet, I just can't get my mind to wrap around the composition just right. I seem to have better success at haiku. Thanks for the linky-link!

You think your efforts are sub-standard? Here's what I composed as the excerpt for this post:

I would have written this
excerpt in dactylic
form but I don't know how,
unskilled I am.

But you can learn from a
master named Wallace, a
lawyer whose blogging skills
are not a sham.

That should make you feel much better!

And here I've always thought a 'dactyl was a prehistoric bird.

Hence my oblique reference to Sir Conan-Doyle. Although I suppose I could have referenced Michael Crichton instead, but since he's not dead, he's harder (and less interesting) to channel.

I looked up what the "ptero-" part meant; wing.

Dactyl can also means finger, and those flying lizards had long bony fingers covered with some kind of hide, not unlike a bat, except they were not mammals.

Hence, "finger-winged."

The meaning of dactyl encompasses "foot" which is where the poetic jargon comes from; each group of syllables that represent an iamb, trochee, or a dactyl, is a "foot," which somewhat ironically is also called a "metric foot."

There was another one or two of those kinds of poetic feet. Has anyone ever told you you have poetic feet? Mine are longfellows.

Ironic, because in the synaptical cross-wiring of my 1953 model wet-ware, a metric foot would be 12 times 2.54 inches, right? A curious fusion of English and metric units of measurement.

See dictionary.com

BTW, were you thinking of "The Land That Time Forgot," by Edgar Rice Burroughs? It had pterodactyls.

Did Conan-Doyle write a prehistoric thriller, too?

Or did Sherlock Holmes and Watson don leopard skins once in a search for Raquel Welch in "One Million Years B.C."?

Time for Christmas.

Doyle wrote "The Lost World." The original.

Go easy on the eggnog, big fella! ;-)