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Iberodactylus

Say it: eye-BEER-oh-DAK-til-us

Name means: “Iberian finger”1

Ate: FishFlying reptilesEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Iberodactylus was a flying reptile that lived about 125 million years ago. It had a big crest on its snout and sharp teeth for catching fish. It was not a dinosaur, but a pterosaur that soared over the coast of what is now Spain.1 2

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

Lived

126 to 121 million years ago4

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Obón, Teruel Province, Aragón, northeast Spain1

Food

Fish2

Wingspan

3.75 to 4.04 m3 1

estimate based on Hamipterus proportions

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How wide were its wings?

wings as wide as 2 bicycles in a row

How big was Iberodactylus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Iberodactylus is known from only one fossil: a partial snout with a crest and six pairs of tooth sockets.1

Its closest relative is Hamipterus from China, which is surprising because they lived so far apart.1

The crest on its snout was blade-like and covered with curved grooves and ridges.1

Scientists think the fossil might be from a male because male Hamipterus had bigger crests than females.1

Iberodactylus lived in a coastal environment, alongside marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and many fish.1

The fossil was found in a limestone layer that was once the bottom of a shallow sea.1

AI-made picture of Iberodactylus — An AI-made picture of how Iberodactylus 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: Iberodactylus
Named by: Holgado et al. 20194
Group: Flying reptiles
Family / clade: Hamipteridae4
Classification: Pterosauria > Pterodactyloidea4
Age of the rocks: 126 to 121 million years (Barremian)4
Rock formations: Blesa4
Countries: Spain4
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: Iberodactylus was named in 2019 by Holgado and colleagues. The fossil was found in the 1980s by local collector Javier Andreu near Obón, Spain.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure about the full size of Iberodactylus because only a piece of its snout has been found.1

Where the facts come from

On a new crested pterodactyloid from the Early Cretaceous of the Iberian Peninsula and the radiation of the clade Anhangueria (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Iberodactylus (en.wikipedia.org)
Iberodactylus 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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