Schaller 2007 reintroduced narrow chord pterosaur wings

When you attend paleo-conventions
you meet colleagues and make friends (and frenemies) as you give your talk, listen to others, rummage through museum collections, take tours and share laughs at elaborate banquets.

At one of the first Wellhhofer pterosaur meetings,
in Munich, Germany, 2007, I was fortunate to meet dozens of fellow pterosaur enthusiasts. Among them was Dietrich Schaller, who handed out a 16-page brochure on pterosaur wings (citation below) from which I scanned and animated the following diagram (Fig. 1) with additional notes that correct Schaller’s diagram added here in the third of three repeating frames.

If someone can provide evidence
for a deep-chord, bat-like pterosaur wing, I sure would like to see it. We’d ALL like to see it. However, as it stands, today, disagreements, like this, between workers who see things one way, or the other, remain political with no one on the opposite side of these arguments providing any evidence for their deep-chord hypothesis. Workers like Elgin, Hone and Frey 2011 trace one thing (and not with precision) then imagine another. Details here.

This is discouraging and disheartening,
because these are trained scientists. They’re not supposed to be making things up, apparently just to maintain the continuity of textbooks and the professors who write them. Thankfully we have a few independent workers like Dietrich Schaller.

Unfortunately,
even Schaller omitted citing Peters 2002 (Figs. 2, 3), who was the first worker since Zittel 1882 to document the narrow chord pterosaur wing membrane. This has been overlooked by all other workers, all PhDs (e.g. Elgin, Hone and Frey 2011), ever since. This fulfills professor S. Christopher Bennett’s curse, “You will not be published, and if you are published, you will not be cited.” In paleontology, it pays to be a PhD (to get published and cited), but look what you have to go through to earn it. On the other hand, look what happens when you just love science and do the work. My advice: keep plowing ahead and take a few bullets.

References
Elgin RA, Hone DWE and Frey E 2011. The extent of the pterosaur flight membrane. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56 (1), 2011: 99-111. doi: 10.4202/app.2009.0145
Peters D 2002. A New Model for the Evolution of the Pterosaur Wing – with a twist. Historical Biology 15: 277–301.
Schaller D 2007. The superordinate pterosaur evolution as deduced from the evolution of their wings. On the occasion of The Wellnhofer Pterosaur Meeting 2007. Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, München, August 2007.
Zittel KA 1882. Über Flugsaurier aus dem lithographischen Schiefer Bayerns. Palaeontographica 29: 7-80.

reptileevolution.com/pterosaur-wings.htm
reptileevolution.com/pterosaur-wings2.htm