Arthurdactylus

Arthurdactylus is a genus of pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation of northeastern Brazil. It was a medium-sized pterosaur, with a wingspan of and body mass of .

In 1994 it was named by Eberhard Frey and David Martill in honor of Arthur Conan Doyle, who featured large reptilian pterosaurs in his novel The Lost World, about a professor finding prehistoric animals still alive on a plateau in South-America. They first spelled the species name as Arthurdactylus conan-doylei, thus with a forbidden diacritic sign, and themselves carried out the necessary emendation to conandoylei in 1998. The holotype is SMNK 1132 PAL, a reasonably complete skeleton, lacking only a skull, neck, sternum and some caudal vertebrae. The specimen, adult or nearly so, was preserved on a plate and is slightly crushed. Arthurdactylus had, compared to the torso length of 22 centimetres, relatively long wings and especially long wing fingers, perhaps much more so than any other pterodactyloid. The hind limbs are however, weakly developed.