#mesadactylus

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! We'll celebrate 5 11/12 day (in reference to learning what my age was a month before my sixth birthday in kindergarten from my mother, which prompted some other kid to insist I was five instead of five and eleven-twelfths) with his favorite sauropod: Apatosaurus ajax! This female is standing in a field of ferns that a flock of Mesadactylus is flying in, and her peace is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a juvenile Apatosaurus chasing some of the pterosaurs. Unbeknownst to her, the juvenile Apatosaurus is her daughter from a past clutch.

We're now 3-for-3 for DinAprils featuring Morrison Formation dinosaurs chasing contemporary pterosaurs.

Dinovember, day 27! ..or...non-dinovember? A mesadactylus spooking a little glirodon.

Very speculative, cause I couldn’t find many other renditions of mesadactylus, and some of them were really different from each other. I did my best 😅

This ends my Morrison formation pieces, so I’ll be wrapping up the month and the coloring book with some critters from the Sundance sea 🌊

By Josh Cotton, retrieved from http://www.pteros.com/, a website dedicated to education about Pterosaurs.

A reminder that we will not be able to do every pterosaur until we reach $240 in donations on our patreon, so please donate even a dollar if you can.

Name: Mesadactylus ornithosphyos

Name Meaning: Mesa Finger

First Described: 1989

Described By: Jensen & Padian

Classification: Avemetatarsalia, Ornithodira, Pterosauromorpha, Pterosauria, Macronychoptera, Novialoidea, Breviquartossa, Pterodactylomorpha, Monofenestrata, Pterodactyliformes, Caelidracones, Anurognathidae

Mesadactylus was another Anurognathid, from the Morrison Formation of Colorado - so what actually would have been flying around during Walking with Dinosaurs! It lived from the Kimmeridgian to Tithonian ages of the Late Jurassic, sometime around 152 million years ago. Like the other members of its clade, it was a small animal, though it is only known from hip vertebrae and its exact size cannot be estimated, though its wingspan was probably about 70 centimeters. Other fossils have been assigned to it, but they cannot really be confirmed as being from the same animal as the original vertebrae. It, like its relatives, would have been a swift moving insect eater in its environment. 

Sources:

http://www.pteros.com/pterosaurs/mesadactylus.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesadactylus

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