Hatzegopteryx
| Hatzegopteryx | ||||||||||||
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Hatzegopteryx thambema |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Cretaceous ( Maastrichtian ) | ||||||||||||
| 72 to 66 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Hatzegopteryx | ||||||||||||
| Buffetaut , Grigorescu & Ciski, 2002 | ||||||||||||
Hatzegopteryx was a very large short-tailed pterosaur (Pterodactyloidea) from the European Upper Cretaceous . The only species described is Hatzegopteryx thambema .
The pterosaur fossils were found in 1978 by the paleontologist Dan Grigorescu in the Hațeg Basin in the Densu Ciula Formation in northwestern Romania and initially believed to be the remains of a theropod dinosaur . Only at the end of the 1990s was it recognized by the light bone structure that it was a pterosaur. Hatzegopteryx lived at the end of the Cretaceous Period ( Maastrichtian ).
Description, way of life and environment
The first finds of Hatzegopteryx were fragments of the skull and the proximal (body-close) part of the humerus . A wingspan of 12 meters can be derived from the estimated length (approx. 550 mm) and the diameter (90 mm) of the preserved skeletal parts. This makes Hatzegopteryx one of the largest flight animals in the history of the earth, with almost the same wingspan as the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus from the Upper Cretaceous region of Texas (USA). The skull of Hatzegopteryx was about three meters long, making it the largest known skull of a non- marine vertebrate. The pterosaur was originally estimated to weigh around 100 kg, but recent research suggests that it may weigh over 200 kg. On the ground, in an upright posture, at 5 to 6 meters , it should have reached a height similar to that of a fully-grown male giraffe .
In the Upper Cretaceous , large parts of today's southern, central and southeastern Europe were flooded by the Tethys Sea . More or less extensive land areas existed as an extensive archipelago , on whose islands land-dwelling vertebrates (vertebrates) had often developed into a typical and relatively diverse island fauna - mainly in the form of small, herbivorous dinosaurs . These subtropical habitats , partly overgrown by forests , persisted until the mass extinction on the Cretaceous-Paleogene border (66 mya) without a significant decrease in biodiversity . More recent fossil finds also indicate that during the late Cretaceous the biodiversity of the pterosauria not only remained constant in other regions (such as today's North Africa), but possibly even increased.
In relation to the fossil record, the Ha -eg Island (now part of Romania's land area) , which is around 80,000 km² in size in the Maastrichtian, is of particular importance. This area is not only a place where the fossil remains of Hatzegopteryx and other pterosaurs are found, but also allows conclusions to be drawn about the ecosystem of a late Cretaceous "island world". Due to the absence of larger theropods , Hatzegopteryx very likely formed the top of the food pyramid of that time . Thanks to a special biomechanical adaptation of the neck and neck, he was probably able to kill prey up to the size of a pony and devour it as a whole.
Origin of name
The generic name is made up of the Romanian Hațeg (German Hötzing , the name of the site in Transylvania) and the ancient Greek pteryx (ἡ πτέρυξ, -υγος (also: ἡ πτερύξ, -ῦγος) = wing). The epithet (additional name) thambema (τό θάμβημα, -ήματος = the horror) alludes to the enormous size of this pterosaur.
literature
- Éric Buffetaut , Dan Grigorescu, Zoltan Csiki: A new giant pterosaur with a robust skull from the upper Cretaceous of Romania. In: The natural sciences . Vol. 89, No. 4, 2002, pp. 180-184, doi : 10.1007 / s00114-002-0307-1 , digitized version (PDF; 115.81 kB) .
Web links
- The Pterosaur Database PDF document
- Archosauria.org
- Dinosaur info
Individual evidence
- ↑ Eric Buffetaut, Dan Grigorescu, Zoltan Csiki: Giant azhdarchid pterosaurs from the terminal Cretaceous of Transylvania (western Romania) . (PDF) In: Geological Society, Special Publications . 217, 2003, pp. 91-104. doi : 10.1144 / GSL.SP.2003.217.01.09 .
- ↑ a b Darren Naish, Mark P. Witton: Neck biomechanics indicate that giant Transylvanian azhdarchid pterosaurs were short-necked arch predators . (PDF) In: PeerJ . January 27, 2017. doi : 10.7717 / peerj.2908 .
- ↑ Zoltan Siki-Sava, Eric Buffetaut, Attila Ősi, Xabier Pereda-Suberbiola, Stephen L. Brusatte: Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago . In: ZooKeys . 469, January 2015, pp. 1–161. doi : 10.3897 / zookeys.469.8439 .
- ↑ Nicholas R. Longrich, David M. Martill, Brian Andres: Late Maastrichtian pterosaurs from North Africa and mass extinction of Pterosauria at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary . In: PLOS Biology . March 2018. doi : 10.1371 / journal.pbio.2001663 .
- Jump up ↑ Matyas Vremir, Alexander WA Kellner, Darren Naish, Gareth J. Dyke: A New Azhdarchid Pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous of the Transylvanian Basin, Romania: Implications for Azhdarchid Diversity and Distribution . In: PLOS ONE . 8, No. 1, January 2013. doi : 10.1371 / journal.pone.0054268 .
- ^ Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon