Night Flying

If a niche exists in nature, some animal somewhere is, was, or will be an expert in that lifestyle. During the Jurassic Laurasia, the northern supercontinent, was populated by a number of pterosaurs that possessed different body shapes and populated different niches. Many different characteristics of these fossil flyers have led researchers to many inferences of diet, flying style, and even time of activity; for example, the scleral rings and orbit shape of Rhamphorhynchus are a key characteristic leading researchers to infer a nocturnal lifestyle. The long-tailed pterosaur has been discovered across Europe and in parts of Africa in deposits that represent shoreline and off-shore environments. The localities, along with cephalopods and fish that have been recovered from both gut areas and coprolites (fossilized feces), point to Rhamphorhynchus as an ocean-going pterosaur. Consisting of three recognized species (R. longicaudus Münster, 1839 (type specimen) , R. muensteri Goldfuss, 1831 (originally Ornithocephalus) and R. etchesi O'Sullivan and Martill, 2015), Rhamphorhynchus was a small (1.26 m, 4.1 ft long; wingspan: 1.81 m, 5.9 ft) needle-toothed pterosaur lacking a crest and possessing a long tail, something pterydactyloid pterosaurs (the kind most people think of when they think of pterosaurs) noticeably lack. The tail, in fact, is the origin of the specific epithet of the type species, R. longicaudus.

Louis Figuier, 1863