#Aerodactylusscolopaciceps #Dinosaurs #Fossil #Paleontology #DinoDelDía #Prehistory #Animalia #Pterodactyloidea #JurassicVibes #Cienciaparatodos #Aurorazhdarchidae #Jurassicperiod #Divulgacioncientifica

John Conway's painting of a Quetzalcoatlus forelimb - Functional morphology of Quetzalcoatlus Lawson 1975 (Pterodactyloidea; Azhdarchoidea) [Padian et al. 2021] Figure 23.
This really helped me understand pterosaur/azhdarchid limbs and joints, which are tricky
#paleoart

I wish things like this would be proper figures and good illustrations and be put into a decent phylogeny. I'm sure it'd resolve quite a lot of issues given the skull and neck characters. The base of Pterodactyloidea is still a bit of a mess to my mind.

did we just get not one, but TWO derived monofenestratan pterosaurs close to the origin of Pterodactyloidea in the span of two days? that's so epic

Phylopic of the Day: Noripterus complicidens

Noripterus are a dsungaripterid (robust, terrestrial) pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous (100 - 145 mya) adapted for feeding on shelled animals.

Image credit: Nix Illustration
License: CC BY-NC 3.0

🧪🦖🦎

www.phylopic.org/images/5edb8...

“...any specimen could be classified as belonging to... more ancestral long-tailed Rhamphorhynchoidea & the derived stubby-tailed Pterodactyloidea.... A truly intermediary&thus convincingly transitional morphology between the major types remained unknown until the discovery of the Wukongopteridae.”