Garudapterus

Garudapterus (meaning "Garuda wing") is a genus of ctenochasmatid pterosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous in what is now Thailand. The type and only species is G. buffetauti, named after the palaeontologist Éric Buffetaut for his longstanding contributions to Thai palaeontology. Garudapterus is known from a partial rostrum and associated tooth fragments discovered in 2023 and named in 2025, making it the first pterosaur species to be named from South-East Asia. It belonged to the gnathosaurine lineage of pterosaurs, possessing a spatulate rostrum and elongate teeth, and is distinguished by the keeled shape and diamond-shaped tip of its jaw. Preserved in an ancient river channel at the Phra Pong locality in rocks of the Khorat Group, it would have lived in a freshwater floodplain ecosystem amongst dinosaurs and other Early Cretaceous animals.

==Discovery and naming== left|thumb|Garuda, namesake of the genus The Phra Prong geologic locality in the Phanom Dong Rak mountain range of Sa Kaeo Province, Eastern Thailand first attracted interest for its fossils in 2002, when the remains of sauropod dinosaurs were reported from the site. Since then, various other vertebrate remains have been discovered from the site. In 2023, part of the skull of a pterosaur was discovered alongside five teeth. It constituted the first skull remains of a pterosaur from Thailand, which had previously only yielded various body fossils. The locality is not assigned to any specific geological formation, but it is thought to be equivalent in age to the rocks of the Sao Khua Formation; both are part of the larger Khorat Group. An earlier 2019 study described a similar tooth from the Sao Khua Formation itself.