Fig. 3. Close ups of foot of LF 2314P (A), and 3398N (B) under UV light. The latter image has been reversed so that it matches the plate and they can be more easily compared. The webbing between the toes and metatarsals is not labelled, but can be clearly seen. Scale bar is 10 mm.
Dr. David Hone has announced new research with Renee and Bruce Lauer of the Lauer Foundation. The paper "Soft tissue anatomy of pterosaur hands and feet – new information from Solnhofen region pterodactyloid specimens" was published in the journal Lethaia and is open access.
As part of my ongoing work tracking down various undescribed Pterodactylus and Rhamphorhynchus specimens, I’ve come across various large bits from Solnhofen beds sitting in museum collections. The really huge wings that I’ve seen, I actually wrote up with my then PhD student Ross Elgin a few years back, but we knew there were more out there, including isolated legs and feet. When I started working with René and Bruce Lauer on the collection from their Foundation, I soon spotted a really nice large leg and foot and thought this would be a good starting point for a paper on these isolated limbs. What I did know until they showed me, was that completely invisible under natural light, the specimen had some exceptional soft tissue preservation under UV, and it was not the only isolated bit like this in their collection. So began a slightly odd pairing of subjects in a paper – large isolated pterodactyloid feet and the soft tissues associated with them. There’s obviously lots more in the paper on these two specimens as well as some others from other collections, but I really want to focus here on the soft tissue material.
The first thing to look at is the webbing between the toes. This has been seen before, including deep in the crux of the metatarsals, but it is arguably clearer and deeper here than seen before and with very clear striations that presumably mark some kind of thickening or stiffening fibers to support it. This is important as it shows that the metatarsals were not bound together at the base of the foot but could themselves spread out if the webbing goes that deep between them.
Abstract
The pterosaur fossil record is known for a large number of complete and articulated specimens, including those with soft tissues, that predominantly come from a number of key localities. However, isolated elements or body parts can still provide important information. Here we describe a leg of a ctenochasmatid pterosaur from the Solnhofen region of southern Germany which shows exceptional preservation of the scales of the foot pad and webbing between the toes. A second specimen shows details of the hand and foot. We show that the soft tissues are remarkably consistent with those of other very distantly related pterosaurs. It is likely that the structure of the surfaces of the hands and feet that contacted the substrate were largely uniform across the clade, despite the enormous differences in habitats, body sizes and temporal differences between the various lineages.
Acknowledgements
We thank Mike Day, Oliver Rauhut and Martin Röper for access to specimens. Thanks to the Lauer Foundation. Jerry Harris and Ruben Guzman-Guiterrez for providing important papers. Adam Fitch discussion of pterosaur taxonomy and Martin Görlich for comments on the locality information. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their comments which helped to improve this work.
