The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling

Author:Shelley Emling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

Mary’s discovery would eventually be called a Dimorphodon, the earliest type of Jurassic pterosaur. It was the first pterosaur—or “winged lizard”—ever discovered outside of Germany. Like all pterosaurs, Mary’s batch of bones initially looked something like a toy model of an animal whose parts had been mismatched by a careless child. For one thing, the head appeared to be far too big for the body. Also surreal were the two types of teeth in its jaw— massively long ones out front, presumably for snatching prey, and shorter sharp ones in back, presumably for grinding up what they caught. Indeed, the name Dimorphodon means “two forms of teeth.”

But what really set the pterosaur apart from other early reptiles were its wings, the structure of which was formed by a slick leathery membrane that stretched like elastic between its body, the top of its legs, and its elongated fourth fingers. It was believed that by flapping their wings, the creatures could fly with relative ease, even though the largest ones probably were forced to rely on updrafts and strong winds to help them with liftoff. First appearing about 200 million years ago—almost 70 million years before the first known bird—pterosaurs had existed alongside dinosaurs.

A contemporary of Mary’s earlier finds, the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur, the pterosaur was believed to be the biggest creature ever to take to the air. Over time, other pterosaur skeletons would be found. Although some were as small as today’s birds, others had wingspans of nearly 40 feet. Like their dinosaur cousins, pterosaurs lived on Earth for millions of years before dying out, leaving no trace of an explanation for their disappearance.

Again, though, Mary wasn’t the first to find remains of the birdlike pterosaur. That honor went to Italian zoologist Cosimo Collini, a former secretary to Voltaire. Collini discovered his bones in a limestone quarry near Solnhofen in northern Bavaria in 1784. Initially he guessed he was staring at a kind of sea creature—perhaps an amphibious mammal of some sort. But later, in the early nineteenth century, Georges Cuvier reviewed illustrations of the remains and quickly interpreted them as being from a flying reptile—a notion promptly dismissed as being too far-fetched.

It was Cuvier who coined the name “Ptero-dactyle,” which means “winged finger,” for that first specimen uncovered in Germany; however, due to the standardization of scientific names, the official name for this species morphed into Pteroactylus. Still, the name “pterodactyl” and “pterosaur” became interchangeable over the years and eventually both stuck, popularly used to refer to all members of this specimen’s order.

For the Philpots and for Mary, the pterosaur was just one more mystery in an ever-shifting, enigmatic universe. After discussing the skeleton that morning, Mary might have recognized that the sisters were as confused as she was. She would have wondered whether the gentlemen were making better sense of things than they were.

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