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Concept
Timeline of pterosaur research
Summary
This timeline of pterosaur research is a chronologically ordered list of important fossil discoveries, controversies of interpretation, and taxonomic revisions of pterosaurs, the famed flying reptiles of the Mesozoic era. Although pterosaurs went extinct millions of years before humans evolved, humans have coexisted with pterosaur fossils for millennia. Before the development of paleontology as a formal science, these remains would have been interpreted through a mythological lens. Myths about thunderbirds told by the Native Americans of the modern Western United States may have been influenced by observations of Pteranodon fossils. These thunderbirds were said to have warred with water monsters, which agrees well with the co-occurrence of Pteranodon and the ancient marine reptiles of the seaway over which it flew.
The formal study of pterosaurs began in the late 18th century when naturalist Cosimo Alessandro Collini of Mannheim, Germany published a description of an unusual animal with long arms, each bearing an elongated finger. He recognized that this long finger could support a membrane like that of a bat wing, but because the unnamed creature was found in deposits that preserve marine life he concluded that these strange arms were used as flippers. The creature was restudied again in the very early 19th century by French anatomist Georges Cuvier, who recognized both that the creature was a reptile and that its "flippers" were wings. He called the creature the Ptero-dactyle, a name since revised to Pterodactylus.
Although Cuvier's interpretation later became the consensus, it was just one of many early interpretations of the creature and its relatives, including that they were bats, strange birds, or the primordial handiwork of Satan himself. Similar animals like the long-tailed Rhamphorhynchus and Gnathosaurus were soon discovered around Europe and it became obvious that earth was once home to a diverse group of flying reptiles. The British anatomist Sir Richard Owen dubbed this vanished order the Pterosauria.
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