Dino card No. 0828 of 2,027

Huanhepterus

Say it: hwan-HEP-teh-rus

Name means: “Huanhe River wing”1

Ate: FishFlying reptilesEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Huanhepterus was a flying reptile that lived in China during the Early Cretaceous. It had a long, low skull with a crest on top and many slender teeth. Its wingspan was about as wide as a small car is long.1 2

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

Lived

137 to 100 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Sanshilipu, Qingyang County, Gansu Province, China2 1

Food

Fish3 1

Wingspan

2 to 2.5 m2 1

estimated from the type specimen

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

wings as wide as 1.5 bicycles in a row

How big was Huanhepterus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Huanhepterus was first discovered in May 1978 when a rock quarry explosion exposed a vertebra. The blast destroyed the right half of the fossil.2 1

It had about 26 pairs of teeth in the upper jaw and 25 in the lower jaw. The teeth were slender, sharp, and curved, and they became shorter toward the back of the mouth.2 1

Huanhepterus is very similar to Gnathosaurus, a pterosaur from the Late Jurassic of Europe. This helped scientists figure out that the rocks where Huanhepterus was found might be from the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary.2 1

The crest on its skull was higher and thicker at the front of the snout and became lower and thinner toward the eyes, where it disappeared.2 1

Unlike some other pterosaurs, Huanhepterus did not have a fused notarium (a structure made of fused back vertebrae). Its neck vertebrae were long and slender.2 1

AI-made picture of Huanhepterus — An AI-made picture of how Huanhepterus 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: Huanhepterus
Named by: Dong 19823
Group: Flying reptiles
Family / clade: Lophocratia3
Classification: Pterosauria > Pterodactyloidea3
Age of the rocks: 137 to 100 million years (Valanginian / Albian)3
Rock formations: Huachi-Huanhe3
Countries: China3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Huanhepterus was named by Chinese paleontologist Dong Zhiming in 1982. The fossil was found by quarry workers in 1978, and Dong later visited the site to confirm it was a pterosaur.2 1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure whether the rocks that contain Huanhepterus are from the Late Jurassic or the Early Cretaceous. The age is still debated.2

Where the facts come from

Huanhepterus (en.wikipedia.org)
A new pterosaur (Huanhepterus quingyangensis gen. et sp. nov.) from Ordos, China (naturalhistory.si.edu)
Huanhepterus 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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