Arthurdactylus
| Arthurdactylus | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Cretaceous | ||||||||||||
| 120 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Arthurdactylus | ||||||||||||
| Frey & Martill , 1994 |
Arthurdactylus conandoylei was a living before 120 million years pterosaurs (Pterosauria) from the Lower Cretaceous of South America and is the only known way in the genus arthurdactylus .
The fossil bones of this animal were found in the Crato Formation , a rock layer in northeastern Brazil . The Crato Formation is a stratum of the Santana Formation , an important fossil deposit that is particularly known for its rich pterosaur fauna.
Arthurdactylus conandoylei is one of the large pterosaurs and has the proportionally longest wings of all pterosaurs with an estimated wingspan of 4.6 meters. The only known skeleton is complete except for the skull , neck and sternum .
The species was described in 1994 by Eberhard ("Dino") Frey and David M. Martill as Arthurdactylus conan-doylei . This spelling was then corrected in 1998 because it did not correspond to the rules of the ICZN . The systematic position of the animal is so far unclear, it probably belongs to the Ornithocheiridae within the short-tailed pterosaurs (Pterodactyloidea) .
The name of the pterosaur is derived from the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , who became world-famous with stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes . In the 1912 successful adventure novel " The Lost World " (original title: The Lost World ), a classic of "dinosaur fiction ", Doyle shows pterosaurs for the first time alongside other prehistoric animals and thus contributes to their popularization. The fictional setting of the novel, an extensive high plateau in South America, reminded the editors of the Araripe Plateau , at the foot of which the fossils of A. conandoylei were found.