Rexarthuria
extinct species of reptile
Rexarthuria is an extinct genus of azhdarchoid pterosaur known from parts of a single humerus (upper arm bone) found in the early Cretaceous (Valanginian age) of the upper Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation in England. The genus contains a single species, Rexarthuria cliftii, originally placed in the genus Palaeornis, which is preoccupied by a bird.
Discovery and naming
"Palaeornis" cliftii was one of the earliest pterosaur discoveries in England and has a long and complicated nomenclatural history. It was originally identified as a prehistoric bird by Gideon Mantell (1837, 1844), but was recognized as a pterosaur by Christoph Gottfried Andreas Giebel (1847) and Richard Owen (1846, 1859), who named it Pterodactylus ornis and P. silvestris respectively. Richard Lydekker (1888) and Reginald Walter Hooley (1914) tentatively referred it to Ornithocheirus, although the holotype NHMUK 2353/2353a does not overlap with the holotype of the Ornithocheirus type species. Peter Wellnhofer (1978) referred Palaeornis clifti to Ornithocheiridae incertae sedis.
Mark P. Witton et al. (2009) re-examined the type specimen and realized that "P." clifti is not an ornithocheirid, referring it to Lonchodectidae based on similarities to humeri assigned to Lonchodectes by Hooley (1914). Averianov (2012, 2014) referred the taxon to Azhdarchoidea indeterminate in his re-assessment of Ornithostoma. In 2025, Thomas and McDavid recovered it as a sister taxon of Tapejaridae.
“Rexarthuria” enters the record as extinct species of reptile. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rexarthuria, extinct and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7126491. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1844, 1847 and 1846.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rexarthuria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.