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Gegepterus

Say it: GEH-geh-TEER-us
Name means: “princess wing”1
Ate: FishFlying reptilesEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Gegepterus was a flying reptile that lived during the Early Cretaceous. It had a long, skinny snout filled with about 150 needle-like teeth, perfect for scooping up tiny animals from the water.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
Sihetun, near Beipiao, Liaoning Province, China31
Food
Fish3
Wingspan
0.8 m2
largest known specimen

When did it live?

Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How wide were its wings?

Gegepterus wings about 0.8 m tip to tipA house cat about 0.5 mA dog about 1 mA bicycle about 1.8 m
as long as 1.5 house cats nose to tail

How big was Gegepterus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Gegepterus was the first pterosaur from the Yixian Formation that scientists could confidently place in the Ctenochasmatidae family, because its teeth were preserved.1

2

The name Gegepterus comes from the Manchu word 'ge ge', meaning princess, and the Greek word 'pteron', meaning wing.1

3

The first fossil of Gegepterus was found in 2001 and included a crushed skull, jaws, and some soft tissue like dark patches near the head.1

4

A second, smaller Gegepterus specimen described in 2011 showed that the animal was covered in hair-like fibers, similar to other pterosaurs.1

5

Gegepterus had about 150 teeth, all thin and needle-like, which helped it strain small prey from the water.1

6

This pterosaur lived around 125 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period, in what is now northeastern China.1

AI-madeAI-made picture of Gegepterus
An AI-made picture of how Gegepterus 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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Scientific name
Gegepterus
Named by
Wang et al. 20073
Group
Flying reptiles
Family / clade
Lophocratia3
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
Gegepterus was named in 2007 by Wang Xiaolin, Alexander Kellner, Zhou Zhonghe, and Diogenes de Almeida Campos. The first fossil was found in 2001 near Beipiao, Liaoning, China.1

Where the facts come from

  1. Gegepterus (en.wikipedia.org)
  2. Gegepterus changi | Pterosaur Database by DinoAnimals.com (dinoanimals.com)
  3. Gegepterus 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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More from the same group: Flying reptiles

PteranodonFlying reptilesQuetzalcoatlusFlying reptilesDorygnathusFlying reptilesRhamphorhynchusFlying reptilesAnhangueraFlying reptilesPterodactylusFlying reptiles

Also from the same time: Early Cretaceous

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