My thoughts of Petrie's father are sort of influenced by the BBC documentary "walking with dinosaurs" and the fact that we haven't ever seen a flyer father figure in the entire series. Scientists assume that there hasn't been much of a "family life" among most Pterosaurs and that it was more about the instinct of "continuation of the own lineage" rather than sweet love and family for them. Unromantic as this may be from a human perspective I could imagine for things to work out the same or similar for LBT flyers.
Mind you,
Walking With Dinosaurs' depiction of a pterosaur life cycle (like many other aspects of the behavior of the creatures portrayed in the series) is purely speculative. As far as I know, there is no actual evidence of pterosaurs engaging in lekking behavior (several males gathering in the same place to court females), or that females and males parted ways immediately after mating. Keep in mind also that pterosaurs were a very diverse group, with huge variation in size and lifestyle among species, so it's a good bet that that their breeding habits varied as well. Fossils of pterosaur eggs and offspring are scarce, so it's not even known if they cared for their young at all, much less whether they were monogamous or not. One thing the fossils do show is that many pterosaur species featured pronounced sexual dimorphism: adornments such as head crests that were present in one gender (presumably males) but not the other. Real-life male
Pteranodon are believed to have been 50 percent larger than the females (as evidenced by distinct size groups in fossil populations). It's generally the case in modern day animals with such striking physical differences between males and females that the two genders have very different roles; one (usually the showy males) display to and/or fight for as many mates as they can, while the other (usually the less conspicuous females) focus their energy on raising the young. In other words, dramatic dimorphism often indicates a tendency for polygamy, so actually it may very well be true that male
Pteranodon did not take much part in raising the young.
Of course, that's real life, and all my sciencey gum-flapping is pretty much moot in regards to LBT (although one thing the series did get right is that only mature male
Pteranodon had long, backswept crests; females and juveniles had small stubby ones). I've noticed, too, that pretty much every visible parent in every flyer family we've seen in LBTóPetrie's family, the cherry-obsessed flaplings in the original film, the
Quetzalcoatlus who narrowly escaped the meteorite-induced earthshake at the start of movie III, the background flyers who appeared during "Grandma's Lullaby" in IVóhas been a single mother; for the life of me I can't remember seeing any with two parents, or even any single fathers (though the genders of the flyer who dive-bombed Ozzy and Strut in LBT II and the
Cearadactylus in V were kind of ambiguous). Petrie's mother's statement in LBT XII about being the one who usually announces new additions to the Flyer family (as if this is something that happens with some regularity) might be interpreted as evidence that flyer fathers don't stick around. It seems strange to me that this would be the case, given the anthropomorphic family patterns seen in most LBT dinosaurs (even some sharpteeth are shown to have nuclear families; there's Chomper and his parents, as well as the
Acrocanthosaurus in "The Lonely Journey"). One could argue that flyers are exempt from the norm because they are not strictly dinosaurs, but I'm still iffy about it. I can think of one alternative possibility; that Petrie has a father, but for whatever reason he is rarely at home (perhaps traveling beyond the Great Valley), and has not been seen thus far because he has never been a needed character (much the same reason that Ducky's father appears to have dropped out of existence). It also occurs to me that if he were to show up at this point, there'd have to be a rehash of Bron's excuse for not being seen before (and we all know how that went
), or else he wouldn't be a very good parental model, which wouldn't work well for the show, considering its target audience (though I think that it could make for some very interesting fanfic material).
I think in the English original they never specify Pterano's family status as anything closer defined than Petrie's uncle (which could make him a brother of either Petrie's mother or his unknown father). In the German version Petrie's mother refers to him as her cousin (which would make him an uncle once removed of Petrie's).
Actually, in the English version Petrie's mother does refer to Pterano as her brother. It is at the beginning of the meeting circle scene after Ducky has been kidnapped, when she is speaking to Ducky's mother ("My brother may be many bad things, but he would never let those others harm her").
