Museum of Paleontology, Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA.
Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Sabadell, Spain.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2018 Sep;2(9):1386-1392. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0627-y. Epub 2018 Aug 13.
Pterosaurs are the oldest known powered flying vertebrates. Originating in the Late Triassic, they thrived to the end of the Cretaceous. Triassic pterosaurs are extraordinarily rare and all but one specimen come from marine deposits in the Alps. A new comparatively large (wing span >150 cm) pterosaur, Caelestiventus hanseni gen. et sp. nov., from Upper Triassic desert deposits of western North America preserves delicate structural and pneumatic details not previously known in early pterosaurs, and allows a reinterpretation of crushed Triassic specimens. It shows that the earliest pterosaurs were geographically widely distributed and ecologically diverse, even living in harsh desert environments. It is the only record of desert-dwelling non-pterodactyloid pterosaurs and predates all known desert pterosaurs by more than 65 Myr. A phylogenetic analysis shows it is closely allied with Dimorphodon macronyx from the Early Jurassic of Britain.
翼龙是已知最早的有动力飞行脊椎动物。它们起源于晚三叠世，繁盛于白垩纪末期。三叠纪翼龙非常罕见，除了一个标本外，其余的标本都来自阿尔卑斯山的海洋沉积物。一种新的相对较大的（翼展>150 厘米）翼龙，Caelestiventus hanseni gen. et sp. nov.，来自北美西部上三叠纪的沙漠沉积物，保存了以前在早期翼龙中未知的精细结构和气动细节，并允许对压扁的三叠纪标本进行重新解释。它表明最早的翼龙在地理上分布广泛，生态多样，甚至生活在恶劣的沙漠环境中。它是唯一记录的沙漠居住的非翼手龙类翼龙，比所有已知的沙漠翼龙早超过 6500 万年。系统发育分析表明它与来自英国早侏罗世的 Dimorphodon macronyx 密切相关。
