Lonchodectidae or Lonchodraconidae[Pêgas, R.V., Holgado, B., Leal, M.E.C., 2019. " Targaryendraco wiedenrothi gen. nov. (Pterodactyloidea, Pteranodontoidea, Lanceodontia) and recognition of a new cosmopolitan lineage of Cretaceous toothed pterodactyloids", Historical Biology, 1–15. ][Unwin, D.M. (2008)] and Pteranodontoidea.[Witton, M.P., Martill, D.M., and Green, M. (2009). "On pterodactyloid diversity in the British Wealden (Lower Cretaceous) and a reappraisal of “Palaeornis” cliftii Mantell, 1844." Cretaceous Research, 30: 676–686.][ Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy, Mark P. Witton (2013)]
Taxonomic history
Lonchodectidae was first named by paleontologist Reginald Walter Hooley in 1914,
[Hooley, R.W. 1914. "On the Ornithosaurian genus Ornithocheirus with a review of the specimens from the Cambridge Greensand in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge", Annals and Magazine of Natural History, series 8, 78: 529-557] and was first considered to only contain species of
Lonchodectes.
[Unwin, David M. 2001. "An overview of the pterosaur assemblage from the Cambridge Greensand (Cretaceous) of Eastern England". Mitteilungen as dem Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Geowissenschaftliche Reihe 4: 189–222] A taxonomic review of pterosaurs from the Cambridge Greensand in 2013 considered
Lonchodectes a
nomen dubium, and named a new family, Lonchodraconidae, for the remaining species, which had been moved to the new genus
Lonchodraco.
,
[J. Lü, S. Ji, C. Yuan, Y. Gao, Z. Sun and Q. Ji. 2006. New pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Western Liaoning. Papers from the 2005 Heyuan International Dinosaur Symposium. Geological Publishing House, Beijing 195-203] Unwindia,
Prejanopterus,
[Witton, Mark P. (2013). Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy] Draigwenia, and
Serradraco have also been considered possible lonchodectids. A taxonomic review of Lonchodectidae by Russian paleontologist Alexander Averianov in 2020 limited the clade to
Ikrandraco,
Lonchodectes, and
Lonchodraco, thus finding Lonchodraconidae to be synonymous with the earlier name Lonchodectidae.
Description
The most diagnostic features of Lonchodectidae pertain to the teeth and jaws. The teeth on both the upper and lower jaws are generally small, do not vary in size through the length of the jaw, and are placed on raised alveolar margins. The upper palate has a prominent ridge. One genus,
Lonchodraco, has prominent crests at the tips of both the skull and mandible, while another,
Ikrandraco, only has a crest on the mandible. Only
Lonchodraco and
Ikrandraco preserve postcrania, which is similar to other
.
Classification
The cladogram below is a topology recovered by Longrich and colleagues in 2018. In their analysis, they placed the family Lonchodectidae as the sister taxon of the family
Boreopteridae, while also placed within the more inclusive group Ornithocheiromorpha.
[Longrich, N.R., Martill, D.M., and Andres, B. (2018). "Late Maastrichtian pterosaurs from North Africa and mass extinction of Pterosauria at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary." PLoS Biology, 16(3): e2001663. ]
Other studies including Pêgas et al. (2019) and Holgado & Pêgas (2020) however, have only included Ikrandraco and Lonchodraco in this group, therefore using the name Lonchodraconidae instead.
Paleobiology
Lifestyle
Postcranial material similar to those of azhdarchoids has previously been referred to
Lonchodectes;
however, this material has later been referred to the azhdarchoid
Ornithostoma.
[Averianov, A.O. (2012). " Ornithostoma sedgwicki – valid taxon of azhdarchoid pterosaurs." Proceedings of the Zoological Institute RAS, 316(1): 40–49.] Ikrandraco is presumed to have been piscivorous, though this is not completely confirmed.
bore sensor pits similar to those of modern probe feeding birds; though it appears to be unlikely that it was a probe feeder due to its large size and broad jaw ends, it has been suggested that it similarly procured food items on the ground or in water such as fish or insects.
