Iberodactylus

In 2019 Borja Holgado and colleagues named a new pterosaur from Spain, Iberodactylus andreui. It’s known from a single specimen discovered in the 1980s by fossil collector Javier Andreu from the Lower Cretaceous Morenillo Member of the Blesa Formation in Teruel Province, Aragón. The scientific name honors the Iberian Peninsula and Andreu.

Iberodactylus is known from a single specimen, consisting of the distal end of the snout. The fragment is about 20 cm (8 inches) long and 13 cm (5 inches) tall. The distal rostrum was tapered to a blunt tip, with the toothrow curving upward. A prominent midline crest is seen rising abruptly from the rostrum over the 5th and 6th tooth positions. Its front edge is slightly concave and looks like a cresting wave in profile. There are parallel curving grooves on the lateral surface of the crest, matching the curvature of the crest’s front edge. 

The rostrum is extremely narrow, being less than 4 cm (1.5 inches) wide for its entire preserved length. The distal end is slightly expanded, and the teeth at the tips of the rostrum were directed slightly outward. There are 8 pairs of teeth or tooth sockets preserved in the fragment, but it likely had many more in the unpreserved portion of the specimen. 

Nothing else is known of the skeleton, but the rostrum fragment is extremely similar to Hamipterus tianshanensis, known from Lower Cretaceous rocks in western China. They both share narrow snouts with tall breaking-wave-shaped crests rising above the fifth tooth position, with parallel grooves on its surface. Iberodactylus is differentiated from Hamipterus by its proportionally deeper rostrum in front of the crest. Comparison with Hamipterus, which is known from dozens of sexually dimorphic specimens, suggests the Iberodactylus individual was a male with a wingspan of about 4 m (13 feet). 

Holgado and colleagues placed Iberodactylus into a phylogenetic analysis of pterodactyloid pterosaurs. They found that it was indeed most closely related to Hamipterus in a lineage they named Hamipteridae. This group was found to be most closely related to the Anhangueridae, made up of Tropeognathus, the Coloborhynchinae, and Anhuanguerinae. Most anhanguerids have semicircular crests on the tips of the upper and lower jaws, as do Cimoliopterus and Ornithocheirus, which were both found to be outside of the lineage including the hamipterids and anhanguerids.