text: The mountain banshee (Ikran in Navi) is an airborne predator which lives in mountainous territory on Pandora. Navi warriors attempt to bond with a banshee, a dangerous and required rite of passage. They are cousins to the great leonopteryx and they are scientifically known by xenobiologists as Pterodactylus giganteus. A banshee bonds to a Navi warrior for life. They are four-winged creatures that, like the leonopteryx and direhorse, have a biologically produced carbon fiber flexing on the skin. Neytiri had a banshee named Seze (translated from the language of the Navi roughly as "blue flower"). Page spent the most time designing the banshee for the film so it would be convincing when it flew or perched. The designer said, "The hardest thing of all was having a Navi on top of it and flying it. You had to backwards engineer it. It was like designing and engineering an aircraft." Barlowe, who contributed to the banshees design, was influenced by manta rays and skates as well as relatively little-known pterosaurs and plesiosaurs that had "many, unique aerodynamic and hydrodynamic" characteristics. Like the color scheme for the great leonopteryx, color schemes based on Earth animals were used for various banshees, though Page was inspired by Art Nouveau prints to warp the schemes so they would not look familiar to film audiences.