Darwinopterus
| Darwinopterus | ||||||||||||
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Darwinopterus modularis |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Middle Jurassic | ||||||||||||
| 175.6 to 161.2 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Darwinopterus | ||||||||||||
| Lü , Unwin , Jin , Liu & Ji , 2009 |
Darwinopterus is a genus of Flugsaurier (Pterosauria) from the Middle Jurassic of China.
The genus was named in honor of the founder of the modern theory of evolution, Charles Darwin , whose bicentenary was celebrated in 2009, the year it was first scientifically described. The only described species ( type species ) of the genus is Darwinopterus modularis .
Fossil record
Darwinopterus fossil remains have been found in the Tiaojishan Formation in Jianchang County, Liaoning Province, China . The holotype with the specimen number ZMNH M8782 is a well-preserved skeleton with a skull, jaw, an almost complete spine , a partially preserved sternum , the shoulder girdle , the pelvis , a partially preserved left front leg (wing) and parts of the hind legs. The fossil is kept in the Zhejiang Natural History Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province .
Another fossil used for the first description is also almost complete. It is only missing parts of the skull, the sternum and a few finger bones. It is kept under number YH-2000 at the Yizhou Museum in Yixian, Yi County, Liaoning Province.
features
Darwinopterus was a relatively small pterosaur with a long tail. The skull was 14 to 19 cm long, the wings were 34 to 46 cm long. The skull was almost twice as long as the dorsal and sacral vertebrae combined - this ratio is greater than that of any other basal (original) pterosaur and also unusual for the short-tailed pterodactyloidea. The part of the skull in front of the eye socket made up more than 80% of the length of the skull (a derived characteristic of some short-tailed pterosaurs). The foremost (nasal) and antorbital cranial windows were combined into a nasoantorbital window and only incompletely separated by a reduced bone brace. On the skull sat a low crest, similar to that of Germanodactylus or other Djungaripteroidea , which reached from the front end of the nasoantorbital window to the rear end of the skull. The jaws contained 15 pairs of needle-like, pointed teeth that were widely spaced and the longest of which were in the front part of the jaw.
The cervical vertebrae were elongated and had short neural processes. Neck ribs were reduced or completely absent. The long, stiff tail had more than 20 vertebrae. The hind legs were characterized by short metatarsals that were less than 66 percent the length of the thighbone and five toes, two of which were elongated.
Systematics
Darwinopterus had a long tail, but its skull anatomy shows features of the short-tailed pterosaurs and is therefore regarded as a mosaic form between the original long-tailed pterosaurs and the short-tailed pterosaurs. It is the sister species of the short-tailed pterosaur and is placed with them in a taxon monofenestrata , named after the only skull window in front of the eye socket.
The systematic position of Darwinopterus illustrates the following cladogram :
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literature
- Junchang Lü, David M. Unwin, Xingsheng Jin, Yongqing Liu, Qiang Ji: Evidence for modular evolution in a long-tailed pterosaur with a pterodactyloid skull. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society. Series B: Biological Sciences. Vol. 277, No. 1680, 2010, ISSN 0950-1193 , pp. 383-389, doi : 10.1098 / rspb.2009.1603 .
