Tapejara (pterosaur)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tapejara
Fossil range: Early Cretaceous
"Tapejara" navigans.
"Tapejara" navigans.
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Sauropsida
Order: Pterosauria
Suborder: Pterodactyloidea
Family: Tapejaridae
Genus: Tapejara
Kellner, 1989
Species
  • T. wellnhoferi (type)
  •  ?T. navigans Frey, Martill & Buchy, 2003

Tapejara (from a Tupi word meaning "the old being") is a genus of Brazilian pterosaur from the Cretaceous Period. The Tapejara genus showed wide diversity in size, some with a wingspan of 6 metres. And each species bore a differently sized/shaped crest that may have been used to signal and display for other Tapejara, much as toucans use their bright bills to signal to one another. Tapejara crests usually consisted of a semicircular crest over the snout, and a bony prong which extended back behind the head (though T. navigans lacked this prong, and therefore may not be a species of Tapejara). Soft tissue impressions also show that in T. navigans, these two distinct prongs supported an even larger crest made of a keratinous material. Even in T. navigans, which lacked bony prongs almost entirely, the full crest rose in a sharp, sail-like "dome" high above the rest of the skull.

Profiles of three species historically assigned to Tapejara. T. imperator has been renamed Tupandactylus, and T. navigans has also been assigned to a new genus.
Profiles of three species historically assigned to Tapejara. T. imperator has been renamed Tupandactylus, and T. navigans has also been assigned to a new genus.

Several studies in 2007 showed that T. imperator and possibly T. navigans fall outside the genus Tapejara and therefore required their own genus names. The species T. imperator was given its own genus, Tupandactylus, by Kellner and Campos.[1] Unwin and Martill found that T. imperator and T. navigans belong in the same genus, and named them Ingridia imperator and I. navigans, respectively.[2] Because Tupandactylus was named first, it retains priority over the name Ingridia. To complicate matters, both the name Tupandactylus and Ingridia used the former Tapejara imperator as their type species, but because the scientists who described Tupandactylus did not include T. navigans, T. navigans has never technically been assigned to this genus. With Ingridia discarded as an objective junior synonym, this leaves "Tapejara" navigans/"Ingridia" navigans without a genus name.[3]

[edit] In popular culture

Tapejara navigans apeared in the 1999 BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs, depicted during a hypothetical breeding season in Brazil. Interestingly, though the series was released in 1999, T. navigans was not formally described and named until 2003.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kellner, A.W.A.; and Campos, D.A. (2007). "Short note on the ingroup relationships of the Tapejaridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea". Boletim do Museu Nacional 75: 1–14. 
  2. ^ Unwin, D. M. and Martill, D. M. (2007). "Pterosaurs of the Crato Formation." In Martill, D. M., Bechly, G. and Loveridge, R. F. (eds), The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil: Window into an Ancient World. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), pp. 475-524.
  3. ^ Naish, D. (2008). "Crato Formation fossils and the new tapejarids." Weblog entry. Tetrapod Zoology. 18 January 2008. Accessed 31 January 2008 (http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/01/crato_formation_tapejarids.php).

[edit] External links