Campylognathoides
| Campylognathoides | ||||||||||||
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Campylognathoides , life reconstruction |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Toarcium ( Lower Jurassic ) | ||||||||||||
| 182.7 to 174.1 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Campylognathoides | ||||||||||||
| Beach , 1928 |
Campylognathoides ("curved jaw") was a genus of long-tailed pterosaurs from the Lower Jurassic .
The first specimen, consisting of a few bones from a wing, was described in 1858 by the Tübingen professor Friedrich August von Quenstedt under the name Pterodactylus liasicus . It was the first pterosaur fossil from the Lias of Württemberg . In 1895 the Stuttgart paleontologist Felix Plieninger recognized after more complete finds from wood maggots that a new genus had to be established for the animals. A total of two species have been described from Germany, the type species C. liasicus and C. zitteli . In 1974 a fragmentary skull from India was described as C. indicus .
features
Campylognathoides is a long-tailed pterosaur from the family Campylognathoididae . The wingspan of C. liasicus was about one meter, C. zitteli had a wingspan of 1.75 meters. Campylognathoides had a shorter skull, with smaller, perpendicular teeth in the jaw, than the Dorygnathus living in the same environment . The eye sockets were relatively large. In contrast to Dorygnathus , the fifth toe of the hind legs is very short. In 1986 a fossil collector found a small pterosaur basin in Posidonia schist near Braunschweig, which could also be assigned to the genus. It showed that Campylognathoides could not hold its hind legs vertically under the body and therefore could not walk biped. Rather, the legs stood out to the side and only allowed quadruple locomotion on the ground.
literature
- Peter Wellnhofer : The illustrated encyclopedia of pterosaurs. Crescent Books, New York NY 1991, ISBN 0-517-03701-7 .
