A few Pterodactyles' bones have been discovered in the Neocomian sands of England and Germany, and other larger bones occur in the Gault of Folkestone and the north of France; but never in such association as to throw light on the aspect of the skeleton.
ORNITHOCHEIRUS
Within my own memory Pterodactyle remains were equally rare from the Cambridge Greensand. The late Professor Owen in one of his public lectures produced the first few fragments received from Cambridge, and with a knowledge which in its scientific method seemed to border on the power of creation, produced again the missing parts, so that the bones told their story, which the work of waves and mineral changes in the rock had partly obliterated. Subsequently good fortune gave me the opportunity during ten years to help my University in the acquisition and arrangement of the finest collection of remains of these animals in Europe. Out of an area of a few acres, during a year or two, came the thousand bones of Ornithosaurs, mostly associated sets of remains, each a part of a separate skeleton, described in my published catalogues, as well as the best of those at York and in the British Museum and other collections in London.
The deposit which yields them, named Cambridge Greensand, may or may not represent a long period of time in its single foot of thickness; but the abundance of fossils, obtained whenever the workmen were adequately remunerated for preserving them, would suggest that the Pterodactyles might have lived like sea-birds or in colonies like the Penguins, if it were not that the number of examples of each species found is always small, and the many variations of structure suggested rather that the individuals represent the life of many lands. The collections of remains are mostly from villages in the immediate vicinity of Cambridge, such as Chesterton, Huntingdon Road, Coldham Common, Haslingfield, Barton, Shillington, Ditton, Granchester, Harston, Barrington, stretching south to Ashwell in Bedfordshire on the one hand, as well as further north by Horningsea into the fens. Each appears to be the associated bones of a single individual. The remains mostly belong to comparatively large animals. Some were small, though none have been found so diminutive as the smallest from the Solenhofen Slate. The largest specimens with long jaws appear to have had the head measuring not more than eighteen inches in length, which is less than half the size of the great toothless Pterodactyles from Kansas.
FIG. 69. RESTORATION OF THE SKULL OF ORNITHOCHEIRUS
The parts left white are in the Geological Museum at Cambridge. The shaded parts have not been found. The two holes are the eye and the nostril
(From the Cambridge Greensand)
The Cambridge specimens manifestly belong to at least three genera. Something may be said of the characters of the large animals which are included in the genus Ornithocheirus. These fossils have many points of structure in common with the great American toothless forms which are of similar geological age. The skull is remarkable for having the back of the head prolonged in a compressed median crest, which rose above the brain case, and extended upward and over the neck vertebræ, so as to indicate a muscular power not otherwise shown in the group. For about three inches behind the brain this wedge of bone rested on the vertebræ, and probably overlapped the first three neural arches in the neck.
Another feature of some interest is the expansion of the bone which comes below the eye. In Birds this malar or cheek bone is a slender rod, but in these Pterodactyles it is a vertical plate, which is blended with the bone named the quadrate bone, which makes the articulation with the lower jaw in all oviparous animals.
The beak varies greatly in length and in form, though it is never quite so pointed as in the American genus, for there is always a little truncation in front, when teeth are seen projecting forward from a position somewhat above the palate; the snout is often massive and sometimes club-shaped. Except for these variations of shape in the compressed snout, which is characterised by a ridge in the middle of the palate, and a corresponding groove in the lower jaw, and the teeth, there is little to distinguish what is known of the skull in its largest English Greensand fossils from the skull remains which abound in the Chalk of Kansas.