The early history of pterosaur discovery in Great Britain

Abstract

AbstractThe first pterosaur fossil was described by Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784, but the epithetptero dactylewas not applied until Georges Cuvier recognized the fossil as that of a volant animal in 1801. In eighteenth-century Britain, pterosaur bones had been discovered in Jurassic strata at Stonesfield, Oxfordshire but were considered to be bird bones, and largely went unnoticed. Bones of pterosaurs considerably larger than those of the first pterosaurs were discovered in the early nineteenth century by Gideon Mantell, but because of their comparatively large size were considered by Cuvier to also be the bones of birds. This perception by early nineteenth-century palaeontologists, including William Buckland and Gideon Mantell, that pterosaurs were relatively small animals was probably the reason their remains went unrecognized in British Jurassic and Cretaceous strata for several decades. Furthermore, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dogmatic acceptance that fossil birdswerepresent in the Jurassic Stonesfield ‘slate’ of Oxfordshire delayed the identification of medium-sized pterosaurs until the late 1820s, when Dean William Buckland described the LiassicPterodactylus(=Dimorphodon)macronyxin 1829. Even after that date many fragmentary, but large, pterosaur bones were misidentified as avian, despite there being no convincing evidence for Mesozoic birds until the discovery ofArchaeopteryxin the 1860s. Truly gigantic pterosaurs were first discovered in Great Britain some 20 years beforePteranodonwas found in the Late Cretaceous of Kansas. However, the British material was so fragmentary that it was easily eclipsed by the spectacular, near-complete skeletons ofPteranodonfound by O. C. Marsh and others from the 1870s onwards.