About the Cover

The first pterosaur skeleton to have been described, by Cosimo Alessandro Collini, who misinterpreted it as a marine creature, in 1784. The specimen comes from the Late Jurassic lithographic limestones of the Eichstatt area of northern Bavaria. This skeleton, now known as Pterodacylus antiquus, was correctly interpreted by Georges Cuvier in 1801 as that of a flying reptile, an identification which was a landmark in the study of pterosaurs. Engraving from the third edition (1836) of Cuvier's Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles• .~