#noripterus

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Noripterus complicidens was a pterosaur that lived in what is now Mongolia and northwest China during the early Cretaceous, about 140 million years ago.

It had a wingspan of up to 4m (~13'), with a head-and-body length of around 1.2m (~4'), and like other dsungaripterids it had a distinctively reinforced skull, with a toothless beak at the front of its jaws and strong widely-spaced teeth further back – an arrangement that was probably used to catch and then powerfully crack open hard-shelled prey.

Unlike other pterosaurs, however, Noripterus also had some very unusual feet.

All other known pterosaurs seem to have had plantigrade hindlimbs, standing and walking with the whole foot on the ground. But Noripterus had toe joints that looked more like those of theropod dinosaurs than other pterosaurs, with a higher level of upward flexibility and potentially a more digitigrade posture standing on just its toes.

With dsungaripterids already having fairly stout body proportions that suggest they spent a lot of time walking around on the ground, Noripterus may have been even more agile and adept at terrestrial locomotion. Digitigrady is generally more efficient for moving at higher speeds, so this pterosaur might have been a runner behaving similarly to modern ground birds, preferring to sprint away from threats on foot rather than launch itself into the air.

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Noripterus

Noripterus — ранньокрейдяний дзунгаріптерид, відомий з формації Цаган-Цаб на заході Монголії та формації Ляньмуцинь на заході Китаю. Він жив приблизно 140 мільйонів років (нижня крейда) тому в наземному середовищі з великою кількістю озер і річок. Це один з небагатьох птерозаврів, знайдених у Монголії, до того ж відомий за кількома добре збереженими скелетами.

Повний текст на сайті "Вимерлий світ":

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

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Name: Noripterus complicidens 

Name Meaning: Lake Wing

First Described: 1973

Described By: Young

Classification: Avemetatarsalia, Ornithodira, Pterosauromorpha, Pterosauria, Macronychoptera, Novialoidea, Breviquartossa, Pterodactylomorpha, Monofenestrata, Pterodactyliformes, Caelidracones, Pterodactyloidea, Eupterodactyloidea, Ornithocheiroidea, Azhdarchoidea, Neoazhdarchia, Dsungaripteromorpha, Dsungaripteridae 

Noripterus is our next Dsungaripterid, known from the Lianmuqin Formation of China as well as the Tsagan Tsab Formation of Mongolia. It lived about 140 million years ago, in the Berriasian age of the Early Cretaceous, and it is one of the only known pterosaurs from Mongolia, and known from several good skeletons to boot. It, like its relative Dsungaripterus, had a stout skull, with a long and pointed snout, and no teeth in the front of the snout, though there were cone-shaped teeth in the back of the mouth, which were probably used for feeding upon shelled mollusks and crustaceans. Unlike Dsungaripterus, it had a straight jaw rather than a curved one, and the teeth are more exposed - which probably means that it fed on different shellfish than the closely related (and closeby) Dsungaripterus. It had a wingspan of four meters, making it a similar size as Dsungaripterus, and both lived in environments filled with expansive inland lakes, where they would have found their preferred forms of food. 

Sources:

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