Anurognathids flew at night according to Clark and Hone 2023

Co-author David Hone,
famous for undiscovering the origin of pterosaurs, reported in an announcement email,

“So the central point of this paper was to try and do some more formal comparisons and see just how the anurognathids fare in comparison. I must confess I didn’t contribute massively to this paper, the lead author Alex Clark, who is based in Cincinnati, contacted me last year with the idea for the paper and really needed help with the pterosaur bit. He’s wrapping up his Masters on bird ecology and thought that it would be a good idea to do some formal comparisons on head shape in various insect-catching birds and those that operate in low light to the anurognathids to see how they overlapped. We also put in some comparisons to some insectivorous bats in terms of their canine shape and the similarly shaped teeth in the pterosaurs.”

“The details are of course in the paper but the really short version is this. Anurognathid heads shapes in terms of their gape is really similar to that of other birds that catch insects on the wing (like swallows and nightjars) and not like that of other pterosaurs. Their eyes are huge and again are like those of nocturnal, or low-light operating birds (in fact they are generally proportionally even larger). In short, this really strongly supports the conventional interpretations of anurognathid ecology. The tooth comparisons to bats were rather less helpful and the data is very scattered, and it’s at least not contradictory to the general idea.”

“No, on the one hand, no real surprises here.“

“I’d like to add a final quick thanks to Chris Bennett for generously letting us reuse some of his drawings to make our own figures clearer and to Manabu Sakamoto who gave us some useful pointers on some of the analyses.

Clark is new to pterosaurs,
but Hone has a history of taking the easy way out (= borrowing data, Figs 1, 2). Precise tracings and reconstructions based on those tracings are not Hone’s cup of tea. That’s why he asked for Bennett’s invalid drawings for this (Fig 1) paper and other papers from other paleoartists (Fig 2). You can see how often David Hone has made paleo-mistakes at this link. It’s so often and regular that I can’t think of any valid contributions Dr Hone has made so far. We’ll celebrate when that happens.

The anurognathid with the largest eyes
is Batrachognathus (Fig 4). Even here the orbit is remains in the posterior half of the skull behind a typically large antorbital fenestra without a fossa. Note the binocular vision.

Backstory.
David Hone learned to borrow from others when he was working on his PhD under Michael Benton (Hone and Benton 2007, 2008). Together they built a supertree to determine pterosaur origins. Building a supertree means borrowing cladograms from others to combine them. You don’t have to look at a single specimen in order to do this. You don’t have to confer with the cladogram authors. You can even drop taxa and citations that don’t fit your narrative, as these two did.

Don’t be like Dr. David Hone.
Do your own precise tracings. That’s the challenge of science. Build reconstructions built on those precise tracings. That’s the challenge of science. Build your own cladogram. That’s the challenge of science. Score your own taxa. Don’t be a re-user.

Be a scientist: explore, observe, report your findings.
Use DGS. It’s a great tool that more and more workers are using to color and identify their bones, especially in µCT scans. Add taxa. Be a life long learner. Re-users never enjoy the satisfaction of discovering something.

References
Bennett SC 2007. A second specimen of the pterosaur Anurognathus ammoni. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 81(4):376-398.
Clark AD and Hone DWE 2023. Evolutionary pressures of aerial insectivory reflected in anurognathid pterosaurs. Journal of Anatomy.
Hone DWE and Benton MJ 2007. An evaluation of the phylogenetic relationships of the pterosaurs to the archosauromorph reptiles. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5:465–469.
Hone DWE and Benton MJ 2008. Contrasting supertree and total evidence methods: the origin of the pterosaurs. Zitteliana B28:35–60.
Hone DWE 2020. A review of the taxonomy and palaeoecology of the Anurognathide (Reptilia, Pterosauria). Acta Geologica Sinica. online link
Yang Z, Benton MJ, Hone DWE, Xu X, McNamara ME and Jiang B 2022. Allometric analysis sheds light on the systematics and ontogeny of anurognathid pterosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Article: e2028796 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2021.2028796

reptileevolution.com/anurognathus-SMNS.htm