Pteranodon

## Species

Pteranodon longiceps

The most iconic pterosaur ever , Pteranodon is a large pterosaur from the Niobrara formation and the Smoky Chalk Hills deposits dating back to the Santonian age of the late Cretaceous period. More fossil specimens of Pteranodon have been found than any other pterosaur, with about 1,200 specimens known to science, many of them well preserved with nearly complete skulls and articulated skeletons. As one of the most well known pterosaurs ever discovered Pteranodon has been featured in most of the movies and documentaries about prehistoric animals including Jurassic Park III , Jurassic World , Jurassic Wold Fallen Kingdom , Chased by Dinosaur and etc.There is a very dangerous misconception about pterosaurs being dinosaurs. No , pterosaurs were their own family and not dinosaurs.

And also there is an extremely ironic thing about Pteranodon. In most of the movies Pteranodon is depicted with teeth while Pteranodon literally means "Toothless wing".

## Discovery

Pteranodon was the first pterosaur found outside of Europe. Its fossils first were found by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1870, in the Late Cretaceous Smoky Hill Chalk deposits of western Kansas. These chalk beds were deposited at the bottom of what was once the Western Interior Seaway, a large shallow sea over what now is the midsection of the North American continent. These first specimens, YPM 1160 and YPM 1161, consisted of partial wing bones, as well as a tooth from the prehistoric fish Xiphactinus, which Marsh mistakenly believed to belong to this new pterosaur (all known pterosaurs up to that point had teeth). In 1871, Marsh named the find Pterodactylus oweni, assigning it to the well-known (but much smaller) European genus Pterodactylus. Marsh also collected more wing bones of the large pterosaur in 1871. Realizing that the name he had chosen had already been used for Harry Seeley's European pterosaur species Pterodactylus oweni in 1864, Marsh renamed his giant North American pterosaur Pterodactylus occidentalis, meaning "Western wing finger," in his 1872 description of the new specimen. He named two additional species, based on size differences: Pterodactylus ingens (the largest specimen so far), and Pterodactylus velox (the smallest).

Meanwhile, Marsh's rival Edward Drinker Cope had unearthed several specimens of the large North American pterosaur. Based on these specimens, Cope named two new species, Orntihochirus umbrosus and Ornithochirus harpya, in an attempt to assign them to the large European genus Ornithocheirus, though he misspelled the name (forgetting the 'e'). Cope's paper naming his species was published in 1872, just five days after Marsh's paper. This resulted in a dispute, fought in the published literature, over whose names had priority in what obviously were the same species. Cope conceded in 1875 that Marsh's names did have priority over his, but maintained that Pterodactylus umbrosus was a distinct species (but not genus) from any that Marsh had named previously. Re-evaluation by later scientists has supported Marsh's case, refuting Cope's assertion that P. umbrosus represented a larger, distinct species.

While the first Pteranodon wing bones were collected by Marsh and Cope in the early 1870s, the first Pteranodon skull was found on May 2, 1876, along the Smoky Hill River in Wallace County (now Logan County), Kansas, USA, by Samuel Wendell Williston, a fossil collector working for Marsh. A second, smaller skull soon was discovered as well. These skulls showed that the North American pterosaurs were different from any European species, in that they lacked teeth and had bony crests on their skulls. Marsh recognized this major difference, describing the specimens as "distinguished from all previously known genera of the order Pterosauria by the entire absence of teeth." Marsh recognized that this characteristic warranted a new genus, and he coined the name Pteranodon ("wing without tooth") in 1876. Marsh reclassified all the previously named North American species from Pterodactylus to Pteranodon. He considered the smaller skull to belong to Pteranodon occidentalis, based on its size. Marsh classified the larger skull, YPM 1117, in the new species Pteranodon longiceps, which he thought to be a medium-sized species in between the small P. occidentalis and the large P. ingens. Marsh also named several additional species: **Pteranodon** comptus and Pteranodon nanus were named for fragmentary skeletons of small individuals, while Pteranodon gracilis was based on a wing bone that he mistook for a pelvic bone. He soon realized his mistake, and re-classified that specimen again into a separate genus, which he named Nyctosaurus. P. nanus was also later recognized as a Nyctosaurus specimen.

In 1892, Samuel Williston examined the question of Pteranodon classification. He noticed that, in 1871, Seeley had mentioned the existence of a partial set of toothless pterosaur jaws from the Cambridge Greensand of England, which he named "Ornithostoma". Because the primary characteristic Marsh had used to separate Pteranodon from other pterosaurs was its lack of teeth, Williston concluded that "Ornithostoma" must be considered the senior synonym of Pteranodon. However, in 1901, Pleininger pointed out that "Ornithostoma" had never been scientifically described or even assigned a species name until Williston's work, and therefore had been a nomen nudum and could not beat out Pteranodon for naming priority. Williston accepted this conclusion and went back to calling the genus Pteranodon. However, both Williston and Pleininger were incorrect, because unnoticed by both of them was the fact that, in 1891, Seeley himself had finally described and properly named Ornithostoma, assigning it to the species O. sedgwicki. In the 2010s, more research on the identity of Ornithostoma showed that it was probably not Pteranodon or even a close relative, but may in fact have been an azhdarchoid, a different type of toothless pterosaur.

Williston was also the first scientist to critically evaluate all of the pteranodont species classified by Cope and Marsh. He agreed with most of Marsh's classification, with a few exceptions. First, he did not believe that P. ingens and P. umbrosus could be considered synonyms, which even Cope had come to believe. He considered both P. velox and P. longiceps to be dubious; the first was based on non-diagnostic fragments, and the second, though known from a complete skull, probably belonged to one of the other, previously-named species. In 1903, Williston revisited the question of Pteranodon classification, and revised his earlier conclusion that there were seven species down to just three. He considered both P. comptus and P. nanus to be specimens of Nyctosaurus, and divided the others into small (P. velox), medium (P. occidentalis), and large species (P. ingens), based primarily on the shape of their upper arm bones. He thought P. longiceps, the only one known from a skull, could be a synonym of either P. velox or P. occidentalis, based on its size.

In 1910, Eaton became the first scientist to publish a more detailed description of the entire Pteranodon skeleton, as it was known at the time. He used his findings to revise the classification of the genus once again based on a better understanding of the differences in pteranodont anatomy. Eaton conducted experiments using clay models of bones to help determine the effects of crushing and flattening on the shapes of the arm bones Williston had used in his own classification. Eaton found that most of the differences in bone shapes could be easily explained by the pressures of fossilization, and concluded that no Pteranodon skeletons had any significant differences from each other besides their size. Therefore, Eaton was left to decide his classification scheme based on differences in the skulls alone, which he assigned to species just as Marsh did, by their size. In the end, Eaton recognized only three valid species: P. occidentalis, P. ingens, and P. longiceps.

   The discovery of specimens with upright crests, classified by Harksen in 1966 as the new species Pteranodon sternbergi, complicated the situation even further, prompting another revision of the genus by Miller in 1972. Because it was impossible to determine crest shape for all of the species based on headless skeletons, Miller concluded that all Pteranodon species except the two based on skulls (P. longiceps and P. sternbergi) must be considered nomena dubia and abandoned. The skull Eaton thought belonged to P. ingens was placed in the new species **Pteranodon marshi**, and the skull Eaton assigned to P. occidentalis was re-named Pteranodon eaton**i**. Miller also recognized another species based on a skull with a crest similar to that of P. sternbergi; Miller named this **Pteranodon walkeri**. To help bring order to this tangle of names, Miller created three categories or "subgenera" for them. P. marshi and P. longiceps were placed in the subgenus Longicepia, though this was later changed to simply Pteranodon due to the rules of priority. P. sternbergi and P. walkeri, the upright-crested species, were given the subgenus Sternbergia, which was later changed to Geosternbergia because Sternbergia was already in use ("preoccupied"). Finally, Miller named the subgenus Occidentalia for P. eatoni, the skull formerly associated with P. occidentalis. Miller further expanded the concept of Pteranodon to include Nyctosaurus as a fourth subgenus. Miller considered these to be an evolutionary progression, with the primitive Nyctosaurus, at the time thought to be crestless, giving rise to Occidentalia (with a small crest), which in turn gave rise to Pteranodon with its long backwards crest, finally leading to Geosternbergia with its large, upright crest. However, Miller made several mistakes in his study concerning which specimens Marsh had assigned to which species, and most scientists disregarded his work on the subject in their later research, though Wellnhofer (1978) followed Miller's species list. and Schoch (1984) somewhat oddly published another revision that essentially returned to Marsh's original classification scheme, most notably sinking P. longiceps as a synonym of P. ingens.

(THIS PART IS MAINLY BASED ON THE ARTICLE BY WIKIPEDIA)

## Behavior

Pteranodon most likely acted like a modern seabird , diving underwater to catch prey. It was a piscivorous pterosaur meaning that the main food source of the animal was fish. This is very likely due to the fact that the Niobrara formation Pteranodon was found in deposits the Western Interior Seaway. Altough Pteranodon had no hunters on land and in the skies it wasn'T very well protected in water. In 1904 Barnum Brown described fossilized remains of a pterosaur (most likely Pteranodon) inside the stomach of a plesiosaur skeleton.

Pteranodon shared it's environment with similar sized pterosaurs like Geosternbergia and Nyactosaurus probably filling up the same ecological niche.

## Physical appearance

Pteranodon had a toothless beak for catching fish. Unlike most illustrations , the beak was curved slightly upwards rather than a straight posture. Also the animal's body was covered in pycnofibers (a type of integument like fetahers) except for some parts like the beak and the wings. Pteranodon was probably colored like a seabird with dark or white colorations all over the body while the crest was brightly colored for display.

**Sexual Dimorphism**

Pteranodon was one of the prehistoric animals that clearly show sexual dimorphism (the differences between two genders of a species) The males were larger and had a bigger crest while females were smaller and had a tiny crest.

## Sources

https://www.pteros.com/pterosaurs/pteranodon.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteranodon

https://www.greelane.com/tr/bilim-teknoloji-matematik/hayvanlar-ve-do%c4%9fa/pteranodon-dinosaur-1091595/

my own knowledge as well