I recently received a sighting report from a lady who was a child in the late 1980’s, in the Houston area.
. . . it was during school and we were outside for either recess or gym. My friend and I both seen the extremely large bird flying in the sky above our school. It seemed to be like that of a pterodactyl.
She told me more, but not much more, in her intial report, but it’s in the consistant accumulation of sighting accounts that evidential value accumulates. Most reports of living pterosaurs (or “pterodactyls” or “flying dinosaurs” or “prehistoric birds”) are somewhat similar to this Houston sighting: The flying creature is close enough for an eyewitness or eyewitnesses to notice details that are both un-bird-like and un-bat-like, but distant enough that skeptics may seem to have the upper hand in proclaiming all such sightings are misidentifications. One problem in the reasoning of such skeptics is that not all sightings are at a distance. A few are quite close, as would be expected of actual encounters. Those close sightings make it obvious that large flying creatures in North America and in other parts of the world are not all birds or bats.
Note that sightings in North America resemble those in Papua New Guinea, in many instances. Most daylight sightings involve a long tail and many of those sighting reports include some structure at the end of the tail, suggesting a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur tail.