Dino card No. 1439 of 2,027

Plataleorhynchus

Say it: plat-uh-LEE-oh-RINK-us

Name means: “spoonbill snout”1

Ate: FishFlying reptilesEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Plataleorhynchus was a flying reptile that lived near the coast of what is now England. It had a long, spoon-shaped snout filled with many thin teeth. It used its special beak to scoop up small water animals for dinner.1 2

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

Lived

143 to 137 million years ago2

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Purbeck Limestone of Dorset, England, near Langton Matravers1 2

Food

Fish2 1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

The front of its snout was shaped like a spoon or spatula, and it held 22 narrow teeth that pointed sideways.1

Scientists think its upper jaw had about 76 teeth in total, counting the ones in the preserved part and the missing ones.1

Its skull was at least 40 centimeters (15.75 inches) long, which is about the length of a big ruler.1

It had a horn-covered pad on the roof of its mouth, which may have helped it crush or handle its food.1

Plataleorhynchus lived during the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous periods, about 143 to 137 million years ago.1 2

The only known fossil of this pterosaur is an incomplete upper jaw, which was found in a chalkstone quarry.1

Its name comes from the spoonbill bird, because its snout looks like a spoonbill's beak.1

AI-made picture of Plataleorhynchus — An AI-made picture of how Plataleorhynchus 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: Plataleorhynchus
Named by: Howse and Milner 19952
Group: Flying reptiles
Family / clade: Lophocratia2
Classification: Pterosauria > Pterodactyloidea2
Age of the rocks: 143 to 137 million years (Berriasian)2
Countries: United Kingdom2
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: The fossil was found in a quarry near Langton Matravers, England, and was bought by the Natural History Museum in 1958. Scientists Stafford Howse and Andrew Milner named it Plataleorhynchus in 1995.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how Plataleorhynchus used its spoon-shaped snout and small teeth, because it is different from other similar pterosaurs.1

Where the facts come from

Plataleorhynchus (en.wikipedia.org)
Plataleorhynchus 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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