Big wings in the Solnhofen

The Solnhofen limestones of Bavaria are famous for their well-preserved fossils and for a pterosaurs researcher, the plethora of specimens and taxa that are represented. Finds continue to this day and we now have more species known from more specimens than ever before, including from a variety of a branches of the pterosaurian tree. The Late Jurassic was an interesting time with the pterodactyloids diversifying, the non-pterodactyloids soon to fade (though doing pretty well) and a few intermediates (wukongopterids, or if you prefer, darwinopterids) are still about. One thing that is true of all of them though is that they are not very big.

While later pterosaurs are famous for producing numerous lineages with wingspans well in excess of 4 and 5 meters and all the way up to 10, before the Cretaceous, there’s basically nothing that even gets up to 2 m in wingspan, and even those tend to be relative giants and quite rare. This is especially true of the Jurassic pterodactyloids which really don’t seem to have got going yet in the size stakes. However, there are some tanatalising hints of bigger individuals or even big species with various bits of limb elements (and slightly bizarrely, some isolated but articulated feet). Not much has been done with these in part because they tend to be very incomplete.

However, quite a few years ago now, Dino Frey at the Karlshue museum in Germany acquired a complete and articulated wing of a large Solnhofen pterodactyloid. It was much bigger than any other known complete wing and it eventually feel to Ross Elgin (then a PhD student under Dino and myself) to work on. We started on this and worked up a manuscript and then sometime later I happened to be in Berlin and spotted on the wall of the collections, another, equally large (though rather less complete and less well preserved) Solnhofen wing. This has apparently sat all but ignored for many years and as far as we can tell, it’s never featured in any paper or been referred to before. So now we had two wings to describe, each of which would have been from an animal with a wingspan of just over 2 m and they turned out to be pretty similar to each other, but what were they?

Working out what they were took some work. After all, it’s perfectly possible that these represent known taxa, but are merely unusually large individuals. And with only the wings to go from, a lot of the anatomical data you would normally want from the skull or some gross proportions of the neck, legs and so on are missing. To make it more awkward, we don’t have a great understanding of the growth patterns of many pterosaurs so it’s not obviously what the trajectories might be of the rarer species where we have only a few specimens.

Looking in detail at our two wings and various other larger Solnhofen pterodactyloids and other isolated large wings showed that these two new ones are different to each other and there are likely two different ‘big wing’ morphs present. A number of major pterodactyloid clades are either around or at least suspected to be present in the Jurassic, and so there was a wide range of possible candidates. However, the anatomy present ruled out most of them (ornithocheiroids, istiodactyloids, azhdarchoids) though it did leave the identity uncertain and they could be ctenochasmatids or very early dsungaripterids.

So while we don’t know exactly what we have here (and we suspect there’s a new taxon in this material based on some unusual features of the Karlsruhe specimen) it is still interesting stuff. We now have a good record of all the largest Jurassic pterodactyloids and clear evidence of animals of over 2 m wingspan. We also have much more detailed information on their anatomy and while the exact identities are uncertain, it looks like there is more diversity here than previously realised and that there are more taxa to be discovered. New specimens are still being uncovered in the Solnhofen so hopefully it is only a matter of time until we have complete, large, pterodactyloids before the Cretaceous.

The paper is open access and fully available here.

Elgin, R.A. & Hone, D.W.E. 2020. A review of two large Jurassic pterodactyloid specimens from the Solnhofen of southern Germany. Palaeontologica Electronica.