The Wicked Teeth of Rhamphorhynchus

With a jaw studded with an array of outward-splaying, large teeth, it behooved von Meyer to name a small group of newly-found pterosaurs from the Solnhofen beds of Bavaria, in southern Germany, Rhamphorhynchus, meaning "branching jaw." The jaw is short, broad at the back ends but fused at their anterior ends, and studded with well-spaced, elongate and curving teeth. They splay out to the sides as well as towards the front, and include a first maxillary tooth that is horizontally positioned, overlapping even the adjacent last premaxillary tooth. The tips of the jaws were toothless, and seemingly covered in a beak-like structure, so that is restored here.

It had been argued that rhamphorhynchids would have plowed through water like the Black Skimmer, Rhynchops niger, but this hypothesis has several biomechanical problems, the least of which is the near total lack of derived adaptations for resisting jaw-shearing forced brought about even by lowest possible speeds through water. Any slow, and the animal wouldn't be able to skim at all, but plop into the water. So the purpose of the odd jaw remains relatively unknown.

Depicted is Rhamphorhynchus muensteri, originally named as Ornithocephlaus muensteri by Georg August Goldfuß (Goldfuss) but was removed as the type species of Rhamphorhynchus a few decades later by Hermann von Meyer. However, the skull shown is actually a conglomeration of the "longicaudus" morph and several other morphs which were lumped into muensteri by studies performed by S. Christopher Bennett in 1995 and 1996. Now, all Rhampho specimens are typically considered a single growth series.