Lonchodectidae or Lonchodraconidae is a group of pterosaurs within the clade Pterodactyloidea. It has variously been considered to be within Ctenochasmatoidea, Azhdarchoidea and Pteranodontoidea. They are notable for their high, conical tooth sockets and raised alveolar margins.
Lonchodectidae or Lonchodraconidae is a group of pterosaurs within the clade Pterodactyloidea. It has variously been considered to be within Ctenochasmatoidea, Azhdarchoidea and Pteranodontoidea. They are notable for their high, conical tooth sockets and raised alveolar margins.
==Taxonomic history== thumb|left|Holotype specimen of Ikrandraco Lonchodectidae was first named by paleontologist Reginald Walter Hooley in 1914, and was first considered to only contain species of Lonchodectes. A taxonomic review of pterosaurs from the Cambridge Greensand in 2013 considered Lonchodectes a nomen dubium, and named a new family, Lonchodraconidae, for the remaining species, which had been moved to the new genus Lonchodraco. Yixianopterus, Unwindia, Prejanopterus, Draigwenia, and Serradraco have also been considered possible lonchodectids. A taxonomic review of Lonchodectidae by Russian paleontologist Alexander Averianov in 2020 limited the clade to Ikrandraco, Lonchodectes, and Lonchodraco, thus finding Lonchodraconidae to be synonymous with the earlier name Lonchodectidae.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).