Ornithostoma
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| Ornithostoma Fossil range: Cretaceous |
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Ornithostoma (meaning "bird jaw") is a genus created in 1871 by H. Govier Seeley for a number of skeletal fragments, mostly of jaws, of toothless pterosaurs, assigned to the Pteranodontidae. One of these fragments had been described by Richard Owen. The type species is O. sedgwicki (Seeley 1891), named for a shoulder girdle from the Upper Cretaceous of England. Some consider it a synonym of Pteranodon, while Bennett (1994) considers it distinct from Pteranodon. Unfortunately Ornithostoma has been treated as a wastebasket taxon, that is, as a convenient label for remains with no distinguishing features, much in the same manner as the dinosaur Megalosaurus. Consequently much pterosaur material has been assigned to Ornithostoma which may belong to their own or already named genera. O. orientalis has been renamed Bogolubovia orientale (Nessov & Yarkov 1989) and been transferred from the Pteranodontidae to the Azhdarchidae.
Other species include O. seeleyi (Lydekker 1904), O. ingens (Williston 1893) = Pteranodon ingens (= P. longiceps) and O. harpyia (Cope 1872) = P. longiceps.
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