Radiodactylus (meaning "radio finger") is an extinct genus of non-azhdarchid azhdarchoid pterosaur known from the Early Cretaceous period of what is now Texas, southern United States. It contains a single species, Radiodactylus langstoni.
Radiodactylus (meaning "radio finger") is an extinct genus of non-azhdarchid azhdarchoid pterosaur known from the Early Cretaceous period of what is now Texas, southern United States. It contains a single species, Radiodactylus langstoni.
==Discovery== Radiodactylus is known solely from its holotype, SMU 72547, a nearly complete left humerus first described by Phillip Murry et al. (1991). The specimen is well preserved in three dimensions with no apparent crushing. The humerus lacks only portions of the proximal end and anterior end of the deltopectoral crest, and has a fracture in the mid-shaft area where it is very slightly rotationally distorted. Radiodactylus was first named by Brian Andres and Timothy S. Myers in 2013 and the type species is Radiodactylus langstoni. The generic name is derived from radio, the prefix for radioactivity in reference to the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant, where SMU 72547 was discovered during the construction of an emergency spillway, and dactylos, meaning "finger" in Ancient Greek which is a traditional suffix for pterosaur genera in reference to their elongate wing digits. The specific name, langstoni, honors the late Dr. Wann Langston Jr. who has been described by Andres and Myers (2013) as "the father of Texas pterosaurology". The holotype was collected from the Glen Rose Formation at the north side of Squaw Creek in Somervell County, dating to the upper Aptian or lower Albian stage of the late Early Cretaceous period, about 119-112 million years ago.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).