Dsungaripterus was a genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 of pterosaur

Pterosaur

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles of the clade or order Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period . Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight...

, with an average wingspan of 3 metres (9.8 ft). It lived during the Early Cretaceous

Early Cretaceous

The Early Cretaceous or the Lower Cretaceous , is the earlier or lower of the two major divisions of the Cretaceous...

, in China, where the first fossil was found in the Junggar Basin.

Discovery and species

Dsungaripterus was in 1964 named by Yang Zhongjian

Yang Zhongjian

Yang Zhongjian , courtesy name Keqiang , also known as C.C. Young, was one of China's foremost paleontologists. He has been called the 'Father of Chinese vertebrate paleontology'...

. The genus name combines a reference to the Junggar Basin with a Latinized Greek pteron, "wing". The type species

Type species

In biological nomenclature, a type species is both a concept and a practical system which is used in the classification and nomenclature of animals and plants. The value of a "type species" lies in the fact that it makes clear what is meant by a particular genus name. A type species is the species...

 is Dsungaripterus weii, the specific name honouring paleontologist C.M. Wei of the Palaeontological Division, Institute of Science, Bureau of Petroleum of Sinkiang. The holotype

Holotype

A holotype is a single physical example of an organism, known to have been used when the species was formally described. It is either the single such physical example or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype...

 is IVPP No. V-2776, a partial skull and skeleton. From 1973 more material has been found including almost complete skulls.

In 1980 Peter Galton

Peter Galton

Peter M. Galton is a British vertebrate paleontologist working in America, who has to date written or co-written about a hundred papers in scientific journals or chapters in paleontology textbooks, especially on ornithischian and prosauropod dinosaurs.With Robert Bakker in a joint article...

 renamed Pterodactylus brancai (Reck 1931), a form from a late Jurassic African formation, into Dsungaripterus brancai, but the identification is now commonly rejected. In 1982 Natasha Bakhurina named a Dsungaripterus parvus based on a smaller skeleton from Mongolia

Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...

. Later this was renamed into "Phobetor", a preoccupied name, and in 2009 concluded to be identical to Noripterus

Noripterus

Noripterus is a genus of dsungaripterid pterodactyloid pterosaur from Lower Cretaceous-age Lianmuqin Formation in the Junggar Basin of Xinjiang, China. It was first named by Yang Zhongjian in 1973...

. In 2002 a Dsungaripterus wing finger phalanx was reported from Korea

Korea

Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

.

Appearance

Dsungaripterus weii had a wing span of 3 to 3.5 metres. Its skull, forty to fifty centimetres long, bore a low bone crest that ran down from the base of the skull to halfway to the beak. Dsungaripteruss head and neck were together almost a meter long. Its most notable feature are its long, narrow, upcurved jaws with a pointed tip, making the animal look like a pair of flying tweezers. It had no teeth in the front part of its jaws, which were probably used to remove shellfish and worms from cracks in rocks or/and the sandy, muddy beaches it inhabited. It had knobbly flat teeth more to the back of the jaw that were well suited for crushing the armor of shellfish.