Geobulletin alpha

A second specimen of Luchibang? 

I was going though a bunch of files this week hunting down some photos of Chinese pterosaurs and came across this one. I took it in a small private museum in Liaoning ten years ago and so didn’t record any details at the time since the material was never likely to be accessible for study

Big wings in the Solnhofen 

The Solnhofen limestones of Bavaria are famous for their well-preserved fossils and for a pterosaurs researcher, the plethora of specimens and taxa that are represented. Finds continue to this day and we now have more species known from more specimens than ever before, including from a variety of a branches of the pterosaurian tree. The

Ten years in the making of Luchibang 

Some research papers can take a long time to finish and delays for all kinds of reasons can put projects on hold indefinitely or even kill them eventually. Luchibang has a particularly long lead up time but the history of this description and naming take in a whole bunch of issues over publication which are

A long overdue welcome to Luchibang 

  Today sees the publication of a new pterosaur that has been a very long time in coming. There’s a hell of a lot to unpack here with both the animal itself and the history of the research so this is going to take quite some time to get through. So, here’s the start of

Welcome Cryodrakon – a giant Canadian azhdarchid pterosaur 

A few years ago Mike Habib invited me to collaborate on a paper looking at the anatomy of the exceptionally well preserved humerus of an azhdarchid pterosaur from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. This specimen is well known as it is a partial skeleton and includes a tibia with bite marks and even a shed

The problem with floating pterosaurs 

A few years ago I published a neat little paper with Don Henderson on the possible posture pterosaur might adopt in water. This was done to try and see if they might have issues if they became stranded on the surface and especially if the head was left at or even under the surface (you

Pteranodon vs Cretoxyrhina 

Over the last 10 years I have published quite a few papers on various feeding traces, shed teeth and stomach contents that help demonstrate and refine some understandings about who ate who in the Mesozoic. These are often very interesting but also frustratingly incomplete and it can be hard to identify one, let alone both,

New Perspectives in Pterosaur Palaeobiology 

So a new volume of papers in now online that I have edited and now there’s lots of pterosaur goodness to access. This is above titled volume produced by the Geological Society and is volume 455 in the Lyell Collection. The full list of papers and links is here but while most have been available

Flugsaurier 2018 Los Angeles 

Well it’s been a while coming but the dates are finally fixed for next year’s pterosaur conference. Keep your diaries free for the 10th-14th of August next year. As ususal there will be talks, posters, specimens and a fieldtrip (or possibly two) and we hope to be havikng a fairly major palaeoart presence as well. […]

Soft tissues and pterosaur taphonomy, but not as you might expect 

In what now seems like a distant and past life, I briefly had a job in University College Dublin teaching in the biology department. Happily, this was on the floor above the earth sciences dept which had a healthy population of palaeontologists including some friends from my previous jobs in both Bristol and Germany. It […]

A cornucopia of pterosaur papers 

I’ve already covered here at some length my paper on the taxonomy of some of the Asian dsungaripterids as related to the rediscovery of some missing material of Noripterus. That paper is my entry to a volume that I have edited with Mark Witton and Dave Martill* and is the collected works that comes off […]

Noripterus returns – sorting out some pterosaur taxonomy 

Immediately after the Munich pterosaur meeting ended in 2007, I moved to Beijing to take up a postdoctoral position at the IVPP. Perhaps the first bit of mail I has there was from the now late Wann Langston thanking me for setting up the Munich Flugsaurier (which he had attended) and sending me a photocopy […]

Would Theropods (and Pterosaurs) Really Have Wanted To Eat Humans? 

In every movie I can think of where dinosaurs and humans meet each other, the movies have you believe that any theropod from a Compsognathus to a Tyrannosaurus see humans as a new, tasty prey. Now I understand that it would subtract from the thrill of the movie if the theropods did nothing to the

The magnificent Caviramus, an early example of an anatomically 'extreme' pterosaur 

The Carnian/Norian Swiss pterosaur Caviramus schesaplanensis, one of the earliest species to take pterosaur anatomy to strange new places. Anyone else want to make puns about 'Cave-iramus' with this picture? No? Anyone...?What happens when you take the innate weirdness of the Triassic Period - the evolutionary equivalent of the late 1960s in terms of experimentation, weirdness and tragic ends to interesting lineages - and multiply it by a pterosaur? One answer is the marvellously strange Late [...]

Flugsaurier 2015 Volume of Papers announced 

I’m putting this up here as I do still get a fair number of visitors and obviously this site is still very pterosaur centric. Pterosaur enthusiasts will know there have been a series of volumes of pterosaur reseach stemming from the various conferences in the last decade or so. First and foremost among them has

We just can't quit you, Pterodactylus 

A small flock of Pterodactylus antiquus, represented by small juveniles (left) up to big adults (right) scope out foraging options in a Jurassic marsh. The animal on the right is luring prey to the surface through paddling forefeet, a behaviour common to (at least) several modern gull species.Pterosaur researchers are infamous for their frequent disagreements over flying reptile evolution, lifestyles and even basic anatomical interpretation. I can certainly attest that there is some truth to [...]

Pterosaur wingtips – not on the straight and narrow 

Take a look at almost any illustration of a pterosaur, be it in a research piece or a life reconstruction and the wing finger is generally depicted as being some kind of straight spar. Each of the four wing finger bones is a dead straight element and the leading edge is therefore basically just a

What pterosaurs tell us about the evolution of feathers 

2011 PR image for the 2014 description of Laquintasaura venezuelae, a basal ornithischian from Venezuela. Scales were the requested integument for this reconstruction, but how does that decision hold up today?For the last two weeks I've been revising an image of the Jurassic ornithischian Laquintasaura venezuelae. The original (above) was produced in 2011, but a request to include it in an upcoming book was impetus to tidy up the art and update the anatomy. One significant question [...]

The life aquatic with flying reptiles 

Pteranodon sternbergi dives for a school of panicked fish. So, what, pterosaurs are super good at swimming now? Read on... Reworked version of an image from Witton (2013). Click here to buy prints of this image (and join my Patreon campaign for a discount!). And yes, I'm calling this animal Pteranodon, not Geosternbergia.Whether or not pterosaurs could swim, or how well they could swim, is a recurrent discussion among those interested in flying reptiles. For the most part, palaeontologists have [...]

First Record of a Lagerpetid Dinosauromorph from the Late Triassic of Argentina 

Martínez, R. N., Apaldetti, C., Correa, G. A., and D. Abelín. 2015. A Norian lagerpetid dinosauromorph from the Quebrada del Barro Formation, northwestern Argentina. Ameghiniana (future issue) doi:10.5710/AMGH.21.06.2015.2894Abstract: The early evolution of Ornithodira, the clade that includes pterosaurs and dinosaurs, is poorly known. Until a decade ago, the basal radiation of