| Anurognathidae Fossil range: Jurassic - Early Cretaceous, 200-101 Ma | |
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 Anurognathus | |
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Anurognathids were a group of small pterosaurs, mostly tailess, that lived worldwide during the Jurassic Period. Some examples are Anurognathus and Batrachognathus. They do have some characteristics in common with the suborder Pterodactyloidea, such as the short and fused tail bones, but they were not closely related.
Classification[]
A family Anurognathidae was named in 1928 by Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás (as the subfamily Anurognathinae) with Anurognathus as the type genus. The family name Anurognathidae was first used by Oskar Kuhn in 1967. Both Alexander Kellner and David Unwin in 2003 defined the group as a node clade: the last common ancestor of Anurognathus and Batrachognathus and all its descendants.
The phylogeny of the Anurognathidae is uncertain. Some analyses, as those of Kellner, place them very basal in the pterosaur tree. However, they do have some characteristics in common with the derived Pterodactyloidea, such as the short and fused tail bones. In 2010 an analysis by Brian Andres indicated the Anurognathidae and the Pterodactyloidea were sister taxa. This conforms better to the fossil record because no early anurognathids are known and would require a ghost lineage of over sixty million years.
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