Dino card No. 0356 of 2,027

Cathayopterus

Say it: kath-AY-op-teh-rus

Name means: “China wing”1

Ate: FishFlying reptilesEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Cathayopterus was a flying reptile that lived in ancient China. It used its long, thin teeth to sift small animals from the water like a living strainer.1

Fun fact: pterosaurs flew over the dinosaurs, but they were their cousins, not dinosaurs themselves.

Lived

126 to 120 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Liaoning Province, China1

Food

Fish2 1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Cathayopterus is known only from a single skull preserved in top view, with its left side damaged.1

Its teeth splay outward at the tip of the snout, just like the teeth of another pterosaur called Ctenochasma.1

It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 122 million years ago.1

The name Cathayopterus uses 'Cathay,' an old word for China, so it means 'China wing.'1

The species name grabaui honors American geologist Amadeus W. Grabau, who studied early Chinese fossils.1

It belongs to a group of pterosaurs called ctenochasmatids, which were mostly filter feeders.1

Cathayopterus probably flew over shallow waterways and used its teeth to strain small creatures from the water.1 2

AI-made picture of Cathayopterus — An AI-made picture of how Cathayopterus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Cathayopterus
Named by: Wang and Zhou 20063
Group: Flying reptiles
Family / clade: Ctenochasmatidae3
Classification: Pterosauria > Pterodactyloidea3
Age of the rocks: 126 to 120 million years (Barremian / Aptian)3
Rock formations: Yixian3
Countries: China3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Cathayopterus was named in 2006 by Chinese paleontologists Wang Xiaolin and Zhou Zhonghe, based on a single skull found in the Yixian Formation of Liaoning, China.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure about the exact size of Cathayopterus, because only a partial skull has been found.1

Where the facts come from

Cathayopterus (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Cathayopterus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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