
Scaphognathus
Sign in to saveScaphognathus was a pterosaur that lived around Germany during the Late Jurassic. It had a wingspan of 0.9 m (3 ft).
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Encyclopedic overview
7 sectionsContents
- Discovery and naming
- Description
- Classification
- See also
- References
- Literature
- External links
Scaphognathus was a pterosaur that lived around Germany during the Late Jurassic. It had a wingspan of 0.9 m (3 ft).
==Discovery and naming== thumb|left|1831 illustration of the holotype slabs The first known Scaphognathus specimen was described in 1831 by August Goldfuss who mistook the tailless specimen for a new Pterodactylus species: P. crassirostris. The specific name means "fat snout" in Latin. This specimen was an incomplete adult with a 0.9 m (3 ft) wingspan recovered from the Solnhofen strata near Eichstätt. In 1858 Johann Wagner referred the species to Rhamphorhynchus. After recognising the fundamentally different snout shape, Wagner, after previous failed attempts by Leopold Fitzinger and Christoph Gottfried Andreas Giebel, who used preoccupied names, in 1861 named a distinct genus: Scaphognathus, derived from Greek skaphe, "boat" or "tub", and gnathos, "jaw", in reference to the blunt shape of the lower jaws.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Scaphognathus” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.