Ornithocheirae is an extinct clade of pteranodontoid pterosaurs from the Early Cretaceous to the Late Cretaceous (Valanginian to Turonian stages) of Asia, Europe, North America and South America.[1] It was named by Harry Seeley in 1870 as a family that contains Ornithocheirus and its relatives. The name was emended to Ornithocheiridae, to match the requirements of the ICZN Code that a family-ranked clade should end with an -idae suffix. Brian Andres (2010) in his review of pterosaur phylogeny, defined the name Ornithocheirae phylogenetically, as a node-based taxon consisting of the last common ancestor of Anhanguera and Ornithocheirus and all its descendants.[2] Thus Ornithocheirae is defined to include two families, the Anhangueridae and the Ornithocheiridae, following the opinion of Alexander Kellner[3] and Andres that these families should not be synonymized based on their original phylogenetical definitions.[2] However, subsequent studies in 2019 have found Ornithocheirae to be a more inclusive group containing both Anhangueria and Targaryendraconia.
Ornithocheirans | |
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Skeletal cast of the species Maaradactylus spielbergi | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Order: | †Pterosauria |
Suborder: | †Pterodactyloidea |
Clade: | †Ornithocheiriformes |
Clade: | †Ornithocheirae Seeley, 1870 |
Subgroups | |
The cladogram below is a topology recovered by Jacobs et al. (2019). Their analysis is similar to the one by Andres & Myers in 2013, though they placed more genera within the families Ornithocheiridae and Anhangueridae, including Camposipterus, Cimoliopterus, Maaradactylus and Siroccopteryx.[4]
Ornithocheirae | |
Many recently subsequent studies have used the term Ornithocheirae for a more inclusive group, which in turn contains the smaller groups Anhangueria and Targaryendraconia.[5][6][7][8] The cladogram below shows a specific study made by Holgado and Pêgas in 2020.[9]
Ornithocheirae | |