Leptostomia () is an extinct genus of pterosaur that lived during the Cenomanian and possibly Albian stages of the ?Early-Late Cretaceous period in what is now Morocco, North Africa. Leptostomia is known from only two isolated rostrum (beak) fragments. In 2021, paleontologist Roy E. Smith and colleagues named the type and only known species, Leptostomia begaaensis, based on these fossils. Leptostomia is a small pterosaur, with the complete skull length estimated between , making it much smaller than many contemporary pterosaurs. The beak of Leptostomia is remarkably long, narrow, and compresse
Leptostomia () is an extinct genus of pterosaur that lived during the Cenomanian and possibly Albian stages of the ?Early-Late Cretaceous period in what is now Morocco, North Africa. Leptostomia is known from only two isolated rostrum (beak) fragments. In 2021, paleontologist Roy E. Smith and colleagues named the type and only known species, Leptostomia begaaensis, based on these fossils. Leptostomia is a small pterosaur, with the complete skull length estimated between , making it much smaller than many contemporary pterosaurs. The beak of Leptostomia is remarkably long, narrow, and compressed from the top down, a morphology unseen in any other known pterosaur.
Due to a lack of remains, the exact classification of Leptostomia is uncertain; it has been recovered in various positions within Azhdarchoidea, a group of edentulous (toothless) pterodactyloid pterosaurs. Leptostomia has been proposed to have a similar lifestyle to probe sensing birds like sandpipers and sanderlings due to its beak anatomy and paleoenvironment.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).