Germanodactylus

Genus of germanodactylid pterosaur from the Late Jurassic

Germanodactylus ("German finger") is a genus of germanodactylid pterodactyloid pterosaur from Upper Jurassic age rocks of Germany, including the Solnhofen Limestone. Its specimens were long thought to pertain to Pterodactylus. The head crest of Germanodactylus is a distinctive feature.

G. cristatus is based on specimen BSP 1892. IV.1, from the Solnhofen limestone of Eichstätt, Germany. It was originally described by Plieninger in 1901 as a specimen of Pterodactylus kochi, and was given its current specific name by Carl Wiman in 1925, meaning "crested" in Latin. Yang Zhongjian determined that it deserved its own genus in 1964. Peter Wellnhofer added it to Germanodactylus in 1970, although Maisch and his coauthors have suggested that it deserves its own genus, "Daitingopterus". David M. Unwin has also referred miscellaneous limb bones and vertebrae from the somewhat older Kimmeridge Clay of Dorset, England to the genus; these finds at the time marked the earliest appearance of short tailed pterosaurs in the fossil record. Bennett suggested in 1996 that Germanodactylus represented adults of Pterodactylus, but this has been rejected by further studies, including his own. G. cristatus had a 0.98 meter wingspan (3.2 ft) and a 13 centimeter (5.1 in) long skull, while "G. rhamphastinus" was somewhat larger, with a 1.08 meter (3.5 ft) wingspan, and a skull measuring 21 centimeters (8.3 in) long.

Germanodactylus is known for its head crest, which had a bony portion (a low ridge running up the midline of the skull) and a soft tissue portion that more than doubled its height. The bony part does not go as far up the head in G. cristatus as in G. rhamphastinus. The soft tissue portion was not known early on, being first described in 2002 by S. Christopher Bennett. It was probably composed of cornified epidermis. Germanodactylus is the first genus for which a soft tissue component of the crest is known, but similar structures were probably widespread among pterosaurs. Head crests like these are now known to be far more extensive in Pterosauria. Of all the pterosaurs known to date, the most basal form with such a crest is Austriadactylus and the most derived are Hamipterus and Tapejara. Darwinopterus and Cuspicephalus also possess headcrests made of "fibrous" bone, demonstrating that the character is a homology, and not a homoplasy.

This genus is unspecialized compared to the pterosaurs of the Cretaceous, and has had varying placements in Pterosauria. Yang Zhongjian, who named the genus, gave it its own family Germanodactylidae. Bennett included the genus in the family Pterodactylidae, and Alexander W. A. Kellner found it to be related to Pterodactylus in his 2003 phylogenetic analysis. David M. Unwin, on the other hand, preferred to consider it a basal dsungaripteroid, a group that evolved into dedicated shellfish eaters. Maisch and co authors considered the genus Germanodactylus to be paraphyletic, meaning the two species were not congeneric. For "G. rhamphastinus" the genus name "Daitingopterus" was used in a table, but the rules of the ICZN were not observed, making the new name a nomen nudum. However, Maisch and his co authors did place both Germanodactylus species in Dsungaripteroidea, like Unwin. However, in a subsequent paper published in 2017, Vidovic and Martill created a new genus for "G. rhamphastinus", Altmuehlopterus. Below is a cladogram showing the results of a phylogenetic analysis presented by Longrich, Martill, and Andres in 2018. In this analysis, they placed the species G. cristatus as the sister taxon of "G. rhamphastinus" within the family Germanodactylidae, and contrary to the concepts mentioned above, both of these species were recovered as closer relatives of more primitive pterosaurs, such as Pterodactylus, within the group Archaeopterodactyloidea.