Dinosaurs | Anurognath | Anurognathus
Anurognathus. a small pterosaur from the family of the same name that lived in Germany in the Jurassic period, 150-145 million years ago. Anurognathus had a short head with needle-like teeth, convenient for catching insects. The skull of this pterosaur was very short and wide, its width exceeded its length. The eyes looked forward, providing the animal with binocular vision.
On the wing-bearing finger, the fourth, the fourth phalanx was missing. According to Bennett, the membrane visible near the lower leg showed that the wing was in contact with the ankle and was thus rather short and wide. Features similar to those of long-tailed pterosaurs are an elongated fifth toe supporting the web between the legs, uropatagium, short metacarpals, and a neck not exceeding the length of the skull.
According to Döderlein, anurognathus, thanks to its long wings, was a fast flyer, swiftly hitting its prey, like modern nightjars. Bennett, however, based on the discovery of much shorter wings, combined with a short tail, concludes that the anurognathus was a slow flying predator that emphasized agility, and that its large eyes were adapted to a crepuscular lifestyle. This is also confirmed by the great flexibility of the wing finger joints.
Anurognathus belongs to the family named after him, the anurognathids, whose representatives are limited to the Middle and Late Jurassic. They were small animals with a wingspan of less than a meter, with short and wide heads, huge eyes and small sharp teeth. Some researchers, such as Alexander Kellner, place them at the very bottom of the pterosaur family tree; an analysis by Brian Andres in 2010 showed that anurognathids and pterodactyloids were sister taxa, which better fits the fossil record because early anurognathids are not known and would require a ghost lineage of over sixty million years.
Although anurognathids are a non-pterodactyloid family, they did not have a long tail with a lobe at the end. Instead, the short tails of anurognathids likely gave them more agility when hunting small, fast prey. The large eyes suggest that these pterosaurs hunted in low light conditions. Some of the contemporary pterosaurs of Anurognathus are thought to have been nocturnal. These probably include water-filtering ctenochasms and piscivorous rhamphorhynchus, while the smaller piscivorous pterodactyls and predatory scaphognathans were probably diurnal.
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