Wiesbaden – The Quetzalcoatlus northropi from the USA, which was scientifically described for the first time in 1975, is not the only pterosaur that has reached a wingspan of up to twelve meters. He has to share that fame today with three other giants d
Pterosaurs Rhamphorhynchus and Pterodactylus in the moonlight. Image: Heinrich Harder (1858-1935) from 1916
Wiesbaden – The Quetzalcoatlus northropi from the USA, which was scientifically described for the first time in 1975, is not the only pterosaur that has reached a wingspan of up to twelve meters. He has to share that glory today with three other giants of the sky from Uzbekistan, Jordan and Romania. Each of them was a short-tailed pterosaur and existed in the Upper Cretaceous period, when the last pterosaurs died out in a mass extinction more than 65 million years ago.
The history of the discovery of the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, named after the Aztec god Quetzalcoatlus and the American aircraft Northrop YB-49, began in 1971, when the American student Douglas A. Lawson discovered a ca When he showed a piece of it to his professor Wann Langston junior (1921-2013) in Austin, he realized that it was the wing bone of a pterosaur. Lawson and Langston only recovered parts of a wing at the site, which had become detached from the body after the pterodactyl’s death. The rest of the skeleton was probably embedded further away at an unknown location.
In 1975, explorer Lawson briefly reported in the American scientific journal Science about the discovery of the giant pterosaur with an incredible wingspan of more than 15 meters in Big Bend National Park and gave it the scientific name Quetzalcoatlus northropi. Later, the likely wingspan of Quetzalcoatlus northropi was corrected to up to 12 meters. The live weight was estimated at 100 to 250 kilograms. The giant pterosaur may have been a scavenger, feeding on the remains of dead animals.
The story of the discovery of the four largest pterosaurs – Quetzalcoatlus northropi from the USA, Arambourgiania philadelphiae from Jordan, Azhdarcho lancicollis from Uzbekistan and Hatzegopteryx thambema from Romania – is told in the book “Pterosaurs in Germany” (2023) by the Wiesbaden science author Ernst Probst. This 567-page, richly illustrated work deals with pterosaurs from all over the world and is available from “Amazon” on the Internet.
The story of the discovery of the impressive short-tailed pterosaur Arambourgiania philadelphiae from Jordan sounds adventurous. It began when, in the early 1940s, a worker repairing the railway line from Amman, Jordan, to Damascus, Syria, came across a 62-centimetre-long fossil bone at Russeifa, near Amman. In 1943 the director of a phosphate mine bought this fossil and informed an English archaeologist about it after the Second World War. In 1953, the bone was sent to the French scientist Camille Arambourg (1885–1969) in Paris, who identified the find in 1954 as the metacarpal bone of a giant pterosaur. In 1959, Arambourg described the bone and gave it the scientific name Titanopteryx philadelphiae. The genus name Titanopteryx means “titanium wing”, the species name philadelphiae is reminiscent of the name of Amman in antiquity. After extremely long cervical vertebrae of the gigantic flysaurian Quetzalcoatlus in Texas came to light in 1971, it was recognized that the supposed metacarpal bone of Titanopteryx in Jordan is also a cervical vertebra. In the 1980s, the Russian researcher Lev A. Nessov (1947–1995) from Saint Petersburg learned about the genus name Titanopteryx from an entomologist. Because this had already been awarded to a fly by a German scientist in 1935, Nessov renamed the genus Titanopteryx Arambourgiania in 1989. The genus name Arambourgiania honors the late Parisian expert Arambourg.
In 1995, scientists David M. Martill (Portsmouth) and Eberhard Frey (Karlsruhe) traveled to Jordan to study the large bone recovered in the early 1940s. But they could not find the fossil. In 1996, a geologist researched that the pterosaur bone had been purchased by a geologist in 1969 and donated to the University of Jordan in Amman in 1973. It was still there in the university collection. Martill and Frey examined the cervical vertebrae, estimated its total length at 78 centimeters, the neck length at around three meters and the wingspan at twelve to thirteen meters. It should not be concealed that later estimates sometimes resulted in a wingspan of only seven meters.
In 1984, the already mentioned Russian researcher Lev A. Nessov made known the gigantic pterosaur Azhdarcho lancicollis from Uzbekistan (Asia). This too is said to have reached a maximum wingspan of twelve meters. The genus name Azhdarcho is based on the Uzbek name of a mythical dragon and the species name lancicollis evokes the long neck. Azhdarcho’s sharp, toothless beak was probably best suited for consuming small vertebrates and carrion. The largest of the giant pterosaurs were grouped into a family called Azhdarchidae by American researcher Kevian Padian in 1986.
In 2002, scientists Eric Buffetaut, Dan Grigorescu and Zoltan Csiki caused a sensation with the news of a gigantic pterosaur discovered in Romania. This giant had a skull about three meters long, a maximum wingspan of twelve meters and a height of up to six meters when standing upright, like a full-grown male giraffe of today. The trio of researchers named the flying animal Hatzegopteryx thambema. The genus name Hatzegopteryx is based on the Romanian name of the locality Hateg (German: Hötzing). The species name thambema (The Terrible) alludes to the enormous size of the pterodactyl.
Many researchers have puzzled over how a giant, weighing up to 250 kilograms, like Quetzalcoatlus northropi could fly. In 2021, Kevin Padian, James R. Cunningham, Wann Langston junior and John Conway put forward the thesis that Quetzalcoatlus northropi jumped three meters high and more in the air and then flapped its wings in flight.
The English paleontologist and paleoartist Mark P. Witton made life pictures showing Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx with a dinosaur as prey. In one image, Quetzalcoatlus is eating a juvenile titanosaur, in another reconstruction Hatzegopteryx is eating a diminutive Zalmoxes, which grew up to three meters long as adults. According to Ernst Probst, the up to 18 meter long predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus from the Cretaceous period in North Africa, described in 1915 by the German paleontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach (1871–1952), occasionally preyed on pterosaurs in addition to fish.
The pterosaurs previously known from Germany did not reach such record sizes as Quetzalcoatlus, Arambourgiania, Azhdarcho and Hatzegopteryx. The pterosaurs from the Solnhofen archipelago in Bavaria in the Upper Jurassic period around 150 million years ago at best had a wingspan of up to 2.50 meters. The approximately 140-million-year-old footprint of a Lower Cretaceous pterosaur left near Bückeburg in Lower Saxony is believed to be from an animal with an estimated wingspan of around six meters. The cast of a dinosaur footprint kept in the Center for Geosciences at the University of Göttingen was presented in 2013 by Jahn J. Hornung and Mike Reich as the first pterosaur footprint in Germany.
Ernst Probst and Doris Probst from Mainz-Kostheim have published numerous books and e-books on various topics.
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