The Princeton field guide to pterosaurs / Принстонский полевой справочник по птерозаврам

Pterosaur remains have been found by humans for millennia and may have helped form the basis for belief in mythical beasts, including winged dragons. In the prescientific West, the claim in the Genesis creation story that the planet and all life were formed just two or three thousand years before the great Egyptian pyramids were built hindered the scientific study of fossils. The discovery and subsequent detailed illustration of the virtually complete and articulated skull and skeleton of the small Pterodactylus found in fine-grained Lagerstätte sediments of Bavaria in the late 1700s began modern pterosaur paleozoology decades before the discovery of teeth and a few bones led to the recognition of land-bound dinosaurs in the 1820s. The strange pterodactyl skeleton posed a major problem for early science because it was still thought that major extinctions had not occurred. The creature had a hyperelongated single finger, which was radically different from the feathery airfoils of birds and also uite distinctive from the multifingered wings of bats. Nor did the very long, spike-toothed jaws belong to either group. <...>