Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage.

The Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Archipelago of Germany has yielded a pterosaur assemblage that has long underpinned and continues to dominate much of our understanding of these flying reptiles. Knowledge of how this assemblage was shaped by processes of fossilization, critical for generating robust paleobiological hypotheses, remains limited. Here, we combine fatal trauma case studies with quantitative taphonomic data to reveal two distinct fossilization pathways.

Identifying pterosaur trackmakers provides critical insights into mid-Mesozoic ground invasion.

Fossilized tracks have provided unique insights into the distribution, behavior, and ecology of extinct taxa. Moreover, because they are abundant and often have distinct distributions in time and space compared with the body fossil record, they have considerable potential for testing and extending macroevolutionary hypotheses. The key to unlocking this vast potential lies in reliably linking tracks to their producers, but this remains a persistent challenge.

Evidence for a mixed-age group in a pterosaur footprint assemblage from the early Upper Cretaceous of Korea.

Here we describe a new pterosaur footprint assemblage from the Hwasun Seoyuri tracksite in the Upper Cretaceous Jangdong Formation of the Neungju Basin in Korea. The assemblage consists of many randomly oriented prints in remarkably high densities but represents a single ichnotaxon, Pteraichnus. Individuals exhibit a large but continuous size range, some of which, with a wingspan estimated at 0.