Archaeopterodactyloidea (meaning "ancient
Pterodactyloidea") is an
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
clade
A clade (), also known as a monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that are monophyletic – that is, composed of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants – on a phylogenetic tree. Rather than the English term, ...
of
pterodactyloid pterosaurs that lived from the middle
Late Jurassic to the latest
Early Cretaceous
The Early Cretaceous ( geochronological name) or the Lower Cretaceous (chronostratigraphic name), is the earlier or lower of the two major divisions of the Cretaceous. It is usually considered to stretch from 145 Ma to 100.5 Ma.
Geology
Pro ...
periods (
Kimmeridgian to
Albian stages) of
Africa,
Asia,
Europe and
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...
.
It was named by
Alexander Wilhelm Armin Kellner in
1996
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A Centennial Olympic Park bombing, bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical Anti-abortion violence, anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 8 ...
as the group that contains ''
Germanodactylus'', ''
Pterodactylus'', the
Ctenochasmatidae and the
Gallodactylidae. In 2003, Kellner defined the clade as a
node-based taxon consisting of the last common ancestor of ''Pterodactylus'', ''
Ctenochasma'' and ''
Gallodactylus'' and all its descendants. Although
phylogenetic analyses that based on David Unwin's 2003 analysis do not recover monophyletic Archaeopterodactyloidea, phylogenetic analyses that based on Kellner's analyses, or the analyses of Brian Andres (2008, 2010, 2018) recover monophyletic Archaeopterodactyloidea at the base of the Pterodactyloidea.
[A preview that shows the cladogram without clade names]
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The Antarctic Campanian specimen MN 7801-V was referred to Archaeopterodactyloidea.
Classification
Below is cladogram following a topology recovered by Brian Andres, using the most recent iteration of his data set (Andres, 2021). Andres' analysis found ''Pterodactylus'' to be a close relative of the ctenochasmatoids.[Andres, B. (2021) Phylogenetic systematics of ''Quetzalcoatlus'' Lawson 1975 (Pterodactyloidea: Azhdarchoidea). ''Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology'', 41:sup1, 203–217. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2020.1801703 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2020.1801703]
In 2017, Steven Vidovic and David Martill recovered a significantly different set of relationships for early pterodactyloids in their own analysis, as shown below.
References
Fossil taxa described in 1996
Pterodactyloids
Tithonian first appearances
Early Cretaceous extinctions
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