Publication Date:
2003-01-01
Description:
The first scientific description of a pterosaur was published in 1784 by Cosimo Alessandro Collini, a former secretary of Voltaire and at that time curator of the natural history cabinet of Karl Theodor, Elector of Palatinate and Bavaria. The specimen came from one of the main sources of such fossils, the Late Jurassic lithographic limestones of northern Bavaria, and Collini, after much deliberation, interpreted it as the skeleton of an unknown marine creature (Collini 1784). In 1801, Georges Cuvier, on the basis of Collini's description and figure, identified the mysterious animal as a flying reptile (Cuvier 1801), for which he later coined the name Ptero-Dactyle' (Cuvier 1809). Cuvier's basically correct interpretation of the winged finger' marked the beginning of the study of pterosaurs as an extinct group of flying reptiles. In the two centuries which have elapsed since those first efforts to understand what have been considered bizarre fossils, the study of pterosaurs has developed enormously. Some of the basic questions about them have long been solved: pterosaurs were neither birds, nor bats, as was suggested by various authors of the early nineteenth century, but a peculiar group of vertebrates which acquired the ability to fly in an original way, using a membrane attached to a single finger of the hand. From the few fossils from the Bavarian lithographic limestones known to Cuvier and his contemporaries, the number of pterosaur specimens has increased enormously, starting with the Early Jurassic specimens from Lyme Regis found by Mary Anning in the 1820s ... This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
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