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Pterygotus is an extinct genus of giant predatory eurypterid, a group of extinct aquatic arthropods.Fossils of Pterygotus have been discovered in deposits ranging in age from Middle Silurian to Late Devonian, and have been referred to several different species.
Pterygotidae (the name deriving from the type genus Pterygotus, meaning "winged one") is a family of eurypterids, an extinct group of aquatic arthropods.They were members of the superfamily Pterygotioidea.
The first pterygotioid fossils to be uncovered were those of the type genus, Pterygotus. Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American biologist and geologist, described the fossils in 1839 and named the genus Pterygotus, meaning "winged one". Agassiz mistakenly believed that the fossils were the remains of a large fish. [9]
Illustration of the holotype specimen of "Pterygotus rhenaniae", a pretelson, by Otto Jaekel, 1914. Jaekelopterus was originally described as a species of Pterygotus, P. rhenaniae, in 1914 by German palaeontologist Otto Jaekel based on an isolated fossil pretelson (the segment directly preceding the telson) he received that had been discovered at Alken in Lower Devonian deposits of the ...
A majority of fossils are from fossil sites in North America and Europe because the group lived primarily in the waters around and within the ancient supercontinent of Euramerica. Only a handful of eurypterid groups spread beyond the confines of Euramerica and a few genera, such as Adelophthalmus and Pterygotus , achieved a cosmopolitan ...
The type specimen of A. cummingsi (a coxa, left) and the type specimen of "Pterygotus buffaloensis" (an appendage including the coxa and part of a chelae, right).. The earliest species of Acutiramus to be named was A. macropthalmus (as a species of Pterygotus, Pterygotus macrophthalmus) in 1859.
Restoration of H. socialis. Hughmilleria is the most basal (primitive) known member of the Pterygotioidea. [1] It was a small-sized eurypterid, with the largest specimen measuring 20 cm (8 in), being surpassed by other members of its superfamily, such as Slimonia acuminata, which measured 100 cm (39 in) in length, and Pterygotus grandidentatus, which could reach 1.75 meters (5 ft 8 in). [2]
The earliest eurypterid reconstruction; a figure of Eurypterus remipes by James E. De Kay (1825).. This timeline of eurypterid research is a chronologically ordered list of important fossil discoveries, controversies of interpretation, and taxonomic revisions of eurypterids, a group of extinct aquatic arthropods closely related to modern arachnids and horseshoe crabs that lived during the ...