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The split between dinosaurs and pterosaurs occurred just after aphanosaurs branched off the archosaur family tree. This split corresponds to the subgroup Ornithodira (Ancient Greek ὄρνις (órnis, “bird”) + δειρή (deirḗ, “throat”), defined as the last common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and all of its descendants ...
The Pteranodontidae are a family of large pterosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of North America and possibly other continents including Europe and Africa. The family was named in 1876 by Othniel Charles Marsh. Pteranodontids had a distinctive, elongated crest jutting from the rear of the head (most famously seen in Pteranodon itself).
Different phylogenetic analyses found it as a basal pterosauromorph, [4] [5] a non-aphanosaurian, non-pterosaur basal avemetatarsalian, a basal dinosauromorph, [11] or a basal archosauriform. [12] This has resulted in a large gap between the fully aerial pterosaurs and their terrestrial ancestors, as the earliest pterosaurs were already capable ...
Life reconstruction of Pterodactylus. The anatomy of pterosaurs was highly modified from their reptilian ancestors by the adaptation to flight. Pterosaur bones were hollow and air-filled, like those of birds. This provided a higher muscle attachment surface for a given skeletal weight. The bone walls were often paper-thin.
Pteranodon (/ t ə ˈ r æ n ə d ɒ n /; from Ancient Greek: πτερόν, romanized: pteron ' wing ' and ἀνόδων, anodon ' toothless ') [2] [better source needed] is a genus of pterosaur that included some of the largest known flying reptiles, with P. longiceps having a wingspan of over 6 m (20 ft).
Anhanguera (Portuguese: [ɐɲɐ̃ˈɡwɛɾɐ] ⓘ) is a genus of pterodactyloid pterosaur known from the Early Cretaceous (Albian age, 125 to 112 million years ago) Romualdo Formation of Brazil (precisely in Araripe Basin) and the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian age, 98 to 93 million years ago) Kem Kem Group of Morocco. [1]
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
In 2003, it was given a phylogenetic definition by David Unwin as the common ancestor of Pteranodon and Nyctosaurus plus all its descendants. Though Marsh had originally named this group based on the shared absence of teeth in those species, most analyses show that all of the traditional "ornithocheiroid" pterosaurs are also members of this clade.