Arambourgiania

Arambourgiania is an extinct genus of azhdarchid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (Maastrichtian stage) of Jordan, and possibly the United States. Arambourgiania was among the largest members of its family, the Azhdarchidae, and it is also one of the largest flying animals ever known. The incomplete left ulna of the "Sidi Chennane azhdarchid" from Morocco may have also belonged to Arambourgiania. In the early 1940s, a railway worker during repairs on the Amman-Damascus railroad near Russeifa found a two foot long fossil bone. In 1943 this was acquired by the director of a nearby phosphate mine, Amin Kawar, who brought it to the attention of a British archeologist, Fielding, after the war. This generated some publicity — the bone was even shown to Abdullah I of Jordan — but more importantly, it made the scientific community aware of the find. In 1953 the fossil was sent to Paris, where it was examined by Camille Arambourg of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. In 1954, he concluded the bone was the wing metacarpal of a giant pterosaur. In 1959, he named a new genus and species: Titanopteryx philadelphiae. The genus name meant "titan wing" in Greek; the specific name refers to the name of Amman in Antiquity: Philadelphia. Arambourg let a plaster cast be made and then sent the fossil back to the phosphate mine; this last aspect was later forgotten and the bone was assumed lost. In 1975 Douglas A. Lawson, studying the related Quetzalcoatlus, concluded the bone was not a metacarpal but a cervical vertebra. In the eighties, Russian paleontologist Lev Nesov was informed by an entomologist that the name Titanopteryx had already been given by Günther Enderlein to a fly from the Simulidae family in 1935. Therefore, in 1989 he renamed the genus into Arambourgiania, honoring Arambourg. However, the name "Titanopteryx" was informally kept in use in the West, partially because the new name was assumed by many to be a nomen dubium. Early 1995, paleontologists David Martill and Eberhard Frey traveled to Jordan in an attempt to clarify matters.

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Related concepts (8)

Arambourgiania

Timeline of pterosaur research

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.

Zhejiangopterus

Zhejiangopterus is a genus of azhdarchid pterosaur known from one species, which lived in China during the late Cretaceous Period. The genus was named in 1994 by Chinese paleontologists Cai Zhengquan and Wei Feng. The type species is Zhejiangopterus linhaiensis. The genus name refers to Zhejiang Province and a Latinized Greek pteron, "wing". The specific name refers to the city of Linhai. In 1986 a young chalkstone quarry worker named Xu Chengfa, found a large fossil near the village of Aolicun in Linhai.