Ornithocheiridae
| Ornithocheiridae | ||||||||||||
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Liaoningopterus , live reconstruction |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Berriasium ( Lower Cretaceous ) to Campanium ( Upper Cretaceous ) | ||||||||||||
| 145 to 72 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Ornithocheiridae | ||||||||||||
| Seeley , 1870 |
The Ornithocheiridae are a family of large short-tailed pterosaurs that were found around the world in the Cretaceous Period. They were probably glider pilots who, like today's albatrosses, glided across the seas and fed on fish.
features
The Ornithocheiridae all had wingspans over one meter, most of them reached 3 to 4.5 or even 6 meters ( Coloborhynchus ). In China, in the Jehol group , an ornithocheirid egg was found, in which an embryo presumably about to hatch was located, which had a wing span of 25 centimeters.
In contrast to the related, toothless Pteranodontidae , the jaws of the Ornithocheiridae were provided with teeth, the front ones were often enlarged. On the front part of the jaws there was often a rounded or triangular bone crest that could serve to improve the streamlined shape of the snout that plunged into the water.
Systematics
The Ornithocheiridae, together with Istiodactylus and the related, toothless genera Pteranodon and Nyctosaurus, form the taxon Ornithocheiroidea , one of the four major evolutionary lines of the short-tailed pterosaur.
Genera
- Annexuera
- Arthurdactylus
- Boreopterus
- Brasileodactylus
- Coloborhynchus
- Haopterus
- Liaoningopterus
- Liaoxipterus
- Ludodactylus
- Ornithocheirus
swell
- David M. Unwin: The Pterosaurs. From deep time. PI Press, New York NY 2006, ISBN 0-13-146308-X .
- Peter Wellnhofer : Pterosaurs. Pterosauria (= The new Brehm library. 534, ISSN 0138-1423 ). Ziemsen, Wittenberg Lutherstadt 1980.
- ↑ Xiaolin Wang, Zhonghe Zhou : Palaeontology: pterosaur embryo from the Early Cretaceous. In: Nature . Vol. 429, No. 6992, 2004, p. 621, doi : 10.1038 / 429621a .