'Missing link' pterosaur found in ChinaChinese and British palaeontologists have identified a crow-sized fossil that they believe fills a key gap in our understanding of the mysterious flying reptiles known as pterosaurs This list of pterosaurs is a comprehensive listing of all genera that have ever been included in the order Pterosauria, excluding purely vernacular terms. The list includes all commonly accepted genera, but also genera that are now considered invalid, doubtful (nomen dubium . The species has been baptised Adj. 1. baptised - having undergone the Christian ritual of baptism baptized Darwinopterus modularis in honour of Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago and 150 years ago published his ground-breaking work on evolution, "On the Origin of Species." The five palaeontologists, reporting on Wednesday in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Proceedings of the Royal Society is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of London. Today, the Royal Society publishes two proceeding series:
fossilized, ossified inflexible - incapable of change; "a man of inflexible purpose" skeletons of the newly-uncovered species were found in northeastern China earlier this year. The finds were unearthed from rocks dated at around 160 million years ago, which places them close to the boundary line between the Middle and Late Jurassic periods, and at least 10 million years older than the first recognised bird, Archaeopteryx Archaeopteryx (är'kēŏp`tərĭks) [Gr.,=primitive wing], most primitive known bird, a 150 million-year-old fossil of which was first discovered in 1860 and described the following year in the late Jurassic limestone of Solnhofen, . Darwinopterus appears to be intermediary between primitive, long-tailed pterosaurs -- sometimes called pterodactyls -- and their descendants, who were short-tailed, more sophisticated flyers that sometimes reached gigantic sizes. "Darwinopterus came as quite a shock to us," David Unwin of the University of Leicester History The University was founded as Leicestershire and Rutland College in 1918. The site for the University was donated by a local textile manufacturer, Thomas Fielding Johnson, in order to create a living memorial for those who lost their lives in World War I. , central England, said in a press release. "We had always expected a gap-filler with typically intermediate features such as a moderately elongated e·lon·gate tr. & intr.v. e·lon·gat·ed, e·lon·gat·ing, e·lon·gates To make or grow longer. adj. or elongated 1. Made longer; extended. 2. Having more length than width; slender. tail -- neither long nor short -- but the strange thing about Darwinopterus is that it has a head and neck just like that of advanced pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton, including a very long tail, is identical to that of primitive forms." Darwinopterus had long jaws, rows of sharp teeth and a flexible-looking neck, which suggests it may have survived on the wing by snatching small mammals or pigeon-sized feathery dinosaurs that were the forerunners of birds. "Darwinopterus" means "Darwin's wing", while "modularis" means composed of interchangeable units. The investigators, led by Junchang Lu of the Institute of Geology in Beijing, believe that pterosaurs went through bursts of evolution characterised by swift changes to groups of features. The head and neck evolved first, followed later by the body, tail, wings and legs, they contend. 
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