"Traditionally, they [pterosaurs] are organized into two suborders:
- Rhamphorhynchoidea (Plieninger, 1901): A group of early, basal ("primitive") pterosaurs, many of which had long tails and short metacarpal bones in the wing. They were small, and their fingers were still adapted to climbing[citation needed]. They appeared in the Late Triassic period, and lasted until the late Jurassic. Rhamphorhynchoidea is a paraphyletic group (since the pterodactyloids evolved directly from them and not from a common ancestor), so with the increasing use of cladistics it has fallen out of favor in most technical literature.
- Pterodactyloidea (Plieninger, 1901): The more derived ("advanced") pterosaurs, with short tails and long wing metacarpals. They appeared in the middle Jurassic period, and lasted until the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event wiped them out at the end of the Cretaceous."
THE LINEAGE:
Rhamphorhynchoidea.
Long tail and teeth.
Pterodactyl.
Shortened tail and lack of teeth.
Modern bird (for example the albatross).
The stork bears a remarkable resemblance to the pterodactyl pictured above. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CigüeñaenÁvila.jpg
ReplyDeleteand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Asian_Openbill_I_IMG_4322.jpg.
The stork has even been mistaken as a modern-day pterodactyl: "A series of sightings of a mysterious pterodactyl-like creature in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley in the 1970s has been attributed to an errant jabiru that became lost during a migratory flight and wound up in an unfamiliar region, or an Ephippiorhynchus stork escaped from captivity." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork)