page_title: Pterodactylus
section_title: Discovery and history
hierarchical_section_title: Pterodactylus / Discovery and history
caption_attribution_description: English: First of two life restorations of Pterodactylus antiquus by Jean Hermann of Strasbourg, sent to George Cuvier in 1800.
context_page_description: Pterodactylus is an extinct genus of euctenochasmatian pterodactyloid pterosaur, whose members are commonly known as pterodactyls. It is thought to contain only a single species, Pterodactylus antiquus, which was initially described as Ornithocephalus antiquus, but the generic name Pterodactylus had been considered the correct term for the animal, and therefore P. antiquus was designated as the type species of Pterodactylus, and O. antiquus as an obsolete synonym of the former. Pterodactylus is also the first pterosaur genus to be named and identified as a flying reptile.
  Fossil remains of Pterodactylus have primarily been found in the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria, Germany, which dates back to the Late Jurassic period, about 150.8 to 148.5 million years ago. More fragmentary remains of Pterodactylus have tentatively been identified from elsewhere in Europe, as well as in Africa.
  Many studies conclude that Pterodactylus was a carnivore that probably preyed upon fish as well as other small animals. Like all pterosaurs, Pterodactylus had wings formed by a skin and muscle membrane stretching from its elongated fourth finger to its hind limbs.
context_section_description: The type specimen of the animal now known as Pterodactylus antiquus was one of the first pterosaur fossils ever to be identified. The first Pterodactylus specimen was described by the Italian scientist Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784, based on a fossil skeleton that had been unearthed from the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria. Collini was the curator of the "Naturalienkabinett", or nature cabinet of curiosities (a precursor to the modern concept of the natural history museum), in the palace of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria at Mannheim. The specimen had been given to the collection by Count Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim around 1780, having been recovered from a lithographic limestone quarry in Eichstätt. The actual date of the specimen's discovery and entry into the collection is unknown however, and it was not mentioned in a catalogue of the collection taken in 1767, so it must have been acquired at some point between that date and its 1784 description by Collini. This makes it potentially the earliest documented pterosaur find; the "Pester Exemplar" of the species Pterodactylus micronyx was described in 1779 and possibly discovered earlier than the Mannheim specimen, but it was at first considered to be a fossilized crustacean, and it was not until 1856 that this species was properly described as a pterosaur by German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer.
  In his first description of the Mannheim specimen, Collini did not conclude that it was a flying animal. In fact, Collini could not fathom what kind of animal it might have been, rejecting affinities with the birds or the bats. He speculated that it may have been a sea creature, not for any anatomical reason, but because he thought the ocean depths were more likely to have housed unknown types of animals. The idea that pterosaurs were aquatic animals persisted among a minority of scientists as late as 1830, when the German zoologist Johann Georg Wagler published a text on "amphibians" which included an illustration of Pterodactylus using its wings as flippers. Wagler went so far as to classify Pterodactylus, along with other aquatic vertebrates (namely plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and monotremes), in the class Gryphi, between birds and mammals.
  The German/French scientist Johann Hermann was the one who first stated that Pterodactylus used its long fourth finger to support a wing membrane. Back in March 1800, Hermann alerted the prominent French scientist Georges Cuvier to the existence of Collini's fossil, believing that it had been captured by the occupying armies of Napoleon and sent to the French collections in Paris (and perhaps to Cuvier himself) as war booty; at the time special French political commissars systematically seized art treasures and objects of scientific interest. Hermann sent Cuvier a letter containing his own interpretation of the specimen (though he had not examined it personally), which he believed to be a mammal, including the first known life restoration of a pterosaur. Hermann restored the animal with wing membranes extending from the long fourth finger to the ankle and a covering of fur (neither wing membranes nor fur had been preserved in the specimen). Hermann also added a membrane between the neck and wrist, as is the condition in bats. Cuvier agreed with this interpretation, and at Hermann's suggestion, Cuvier became the first to publish these ideas in December 1800 in a very short description. However, contrary to Hermann, Cuvier was convinced the animal was a reptile.The specimen had not in fact been seized by the French. Rather, in 1802, following the death of Charles Theodore, it was brought to Munich, where Baron Johann Paul Carl von Moll had obtained a general exemption of confiscation for the Bavarian collections. Cuvier asked von Moll to study the fossil but was informed it could not be found. In 1809 Cuvier published a somewhat longer description, in which he named the animal Petro-Dactyle, this was a typographical error however, and was later corrected by him to Ptéro-Dactyle. He also refuted a hypothesis by Johann Friedric
caption: Hermann's original life restoration, the first of any pterosaur, 1800
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