| Ornithostoma Temporal range: Late Cretaceous, 98 Ma |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Order: | †Pterosauria |
| Suborder: | †Pterodactyloidea |
| Family: | †Pteranodontidae |
| Genus: | †Ornithostoma Seeley, 1871 |
| Species: | †O. sedgwicki Seeley, 1891 |
| Synonyms | |
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Ornithostoma (meaning "bird mouth") is a genus created in 1871 by H. Govier Seeley for a number of skeletal fragments, mostly of jaws, of toothless pterosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous Cambridge Greensand of England, today often assigned to the Pteranodontidae. One of these fragments had in 1859 been described by Richard Owen. In 1871 Seeley as yet provided no specific name. He named the type species O. sedgwicki (Seeley 1891) in 1891, apart from the jaws also referring to a shoulder girdle, claiming it was identical to Pteranodon and had priority. Samuel Wendell Williston in 1893 independently also considered it a synonym of Pteranodon ingens. He therefore renamed Pteranodon species: O. ingens (Williston 1893) = Pteranodon ingens (= P. longiceps) and O. harpyia (Cope 1872) = P. longiceps. However, Richard Lydekker denied the identity in 1904 and, unaware of Seeley's earlier species name, created a purported second type species O. seeleyi.
Today S. Christopher Bennett (1994) also considers it distinct from Pteranodon. Unfortunately Ornithostoma has been treated as a wastebasket taxon, that is, as a convenient label for remains with no distinguishing features, much in the same manner as the dinosaur Megalosaurus. Consequently much pterosaur material has been assigned to Ornithostoma which may belong to their own or already named genera.
In 1914 Nikolai Nikolaevich Bogolubov named a single large vertebra Ornithostoma orientalis (emended O. orientale by George Olshevsky in 1991) which has been renamed Bogolubovia orientalis (Nesov & Yarkov 1989) and been transferred from the Pteranodontidae to the Azhdarchidae.