Pterosaur worker contributions ‘taken seriously’

In 2026 pterosaur worker Dr SC Bennett wrote
to ‘yours truly’, “I am afraid that neither you nor your contributions seem to be taken seriously by other pterosaur workers.”

As discussed earlier, ‘taken seriously’ is code for ‘you will never referee our manuscript submissions, so you can be ignored’. This attitude is homologous with ‘why the world has to ignore David Peters and ReptileEvolution.com’ (quoting paleontolgist Darren Naish).

These statements follow peer-reviewed publications by ‘yours truly’ in Nature, Science, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Ichnos, Historical Biology, and Rivista Italiana.

As a reminder, the scientific method requires only observation, description, testing and reporting. It allows for mistakes. It does not require a PhD. It is up to others whether or not contributions are ‘taken seriously’ or not.

While understandable from the perspective of a PhD, suppression and omission has never been a part of the scientific method.

These are the parameters PhDs (and the rest of us) learned in middle school.

At the same time, suppression, ridicule and omission have been ingrained in the scientific community at large. Paleo is no exception.

Today
let’s ‘take seriously’ several of Dr SC Bennett’s contributions.

Bennett (1991, 1992, 1994, 2001)
thoroughly described Pteranodon, but proposed that only two species were present, P. longiceps and P. sternbergi, with all other variations attributable to gender (small crest, large pelvis) and maturity (small crest, small size, unfused scapulocoracoid, unfused extensor tendon process), which has been widely accepted. Bennett used measurements and statistics = graphs = bivariate analysis.

Unfortunately, Bennett did not publish a cladistic analysis to support his hypothesis. Here a phylogenetic analysis of pterosaurs reveals that these differences were actually phylogenetic, with most (but not all) smaller Pteranodon specimens with smaller crests were more primitive, closer to Eopteranodon and Germanodactylus.

The wider pelvis belonged to a large Nyctosaurus, not a Pteranodon.

That’s a great deal of work (including Bennett’s PhD thesis), but a statistical analysis of ingroup taxa cannot compete with a phylogenetic analysis that includes outgroup taxa. Pertinent omissions can be fatal to a hypothesis.

Bennett 2007a described
Anurognathus? the SMNS specimen  Tithonian, Late Jurassic, ~150 mya, ~5 cm in length as a second, much smaller specimen of Anurognathus ammoni. The skull was described as having an enormous orbit in the anterior half of the skull, little to no antorbital fenestra, and a broad set of parietals with widely spaced upper temporal fenestra among several other autapomorphies. Unfortunately these interpretations were illusions. No sister taxa have these traits. Nevertheless, this false reconstruction has been widely accepted. The differences are enough to erect a new genus.

Bennett 2007b reconstructed
the pteroid of Anhanguera rooted atop the medial = preaxial carpal. This reflected an earlier fad by Frey and Riess 1981 who rotated the pteroid anteriorly, like machine guns on a Spitfire wing.

Peters 2009 corrected these problems by loosely rooting the pteroid on the leading edge of the radiale and passively oriented toward the deltopectoral crest, leaving the preaxial carpal uncapped – as preserved in undisturbed specimens, including Cosesaurus, a pterosaur ancestor.

No follow up papers defending earlier hypotheses have appeared since then.
Evidently the contribution by Peters 2009 was not ‘taken seriously’.

Bennett 1997
reconstruction of Pterodactylus walking placed the manus so far ahead of the shoulder joint that it could not contribute a forward vector, as in all other tetrapods. In other words, it was constantly braking.

In this PH blogpost an animation matched to tracks show a more upright stance in which the forelimbs were used like ski poles and the feet were placed beneath the center of gravity, lift and balance, as in birds.

While we’re at it,
let’s not ‘ignore’ the contributions of Darren Naish.

A long list of pterosaur mistakes
were published in Naish and Martill 2003, and repeated in Naish and Martill 2005 (details here). These include support for the myth of the bat-wing pterosaur wing membrane model, support for the myth that an antorbital fenestra was restircted to archosauriforms, support for the myth of the ‘fifth digit that is hooked towards the tail’, support for the myth that the pteroid was ‘mobile and used to control the attitude of the propatagium’, support for the myth of unknown pterosaur ancestors, support for the ability of giant azhdarchids to fly.

In summary,
I hope their own words don’t make these two PhDs seem insecure and insular. In their social media ‘contributions’ neither paleontologist seem to take the scientific method seriously: focusing on the content, rather than the content creator.

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.

It is OK to make errors,
so long as the scientific method is followed. It is also OK for an amateur to call out the errors made by PhDs. It is not okay to tell fellow workers their peer-reviewed and published academic journal contributions are not ‘taken seriously’.

But really, what are you going to do about it? And we are dealing here with reality.

On the other hand,
when we focus on the content of these two PhDs, which the world should take seriously, and not ignore, problems appear that an amateur was left to recognize and report. That’s troubling because that means their fellow PhDs stayed silent, sheltering their friends and colleagues from the scientific benefits that accrue from critical reports.

Perhaps the above explains why so many odd and untenable hypotheses have been published recently. Perhaps these are due to professional courtesy – in other words: not examined critically – which is at the core of the scientific method.

I understand
editors would be deemed unwise to offer non-academics (no matter their expertise) the opportunity to referee submissions by academics. To my knowledge that has never happened.

Please falsify that statement if you are able to do so.

On the other hand,
the concept of ‘expert’ is now on shaky ground when so many mistakes and myths in paleontology continue to be uncritically promoted by ‘experts’ while falsifiable competing observations and hypotheses published in academic journals by ‘yours truly’ are not ‘taken seriously.’

References
Bennett SC 1991. Morphology of the Late Cretaceous Pterosaur Pteranodon and Systematics of the Pterodactyloidea. [Volumes I & II]. Ph.D. thesis, University of Kansas, University Microfilms International/ProQuest.
Bennett SC 1992. Sexual dimorphism of Pteranodon and other pterosaurs, with comments on cranial crests. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 12: 422–434.
Bennett SC 1994. Taxonomy and systematics of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Pteranodon (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea). Occassional Papers of the Natural History Museum University of Kansas 169: 1–70.
Bennett SC 1997b. Terrestrial locomotion of pterosaurs: a reconstruction based on Pteraichnus trackways. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 17: 104–113.
Bennett SC 2001. The osteology and functional morphology of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Pteranodon. Part I. General description of osteology. Palaeontographica, Abteilung A, 260: 1–112. Part II. Functional morphology. Palaeontographica, Abteilung A, 260: 113–153.
Bennett SC 2007a. A second specimen of the pterosaur Anurognathus ammoni. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 81(4):376-398.
Bennett SC 2007b. Articulation and Function of the Pteroid Bone of Pterosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27(4):881–891.
Naish D and Martill DM 2003. Pterosaurs – a successful invasion of prehistoric skies. Biologist 50 (5):213–216.
Naish D and Martill DM 2005. Fossil Vertebrates / Flying Reptiles. In Encyclopedia of Geology, 2005.
Peters D 2009. A reinterpretation of pteroid articulation in pterosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate  Paleontology 29(4):1327–1330.

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/04/18/pterosaur-worker-contributions-taken-seriously/