The Pterosaur Bone Mistaken for a Bird

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Imagine finding a single 135 million year old puzzle piece buried in the dirt. Just one piece. Right. Just one tiny piece. You wipe it off and immediately you declare to the world that you have solved the entire picture. Welcome to The Deep Dove. Glad to be here. You are the learner and today we are unpacking a really fascinating case study from the taxonomic archives. You're looking at how one isolated fragment of bone managed to ignite a nearly 200 year

1:00scientific identity crisis. It really is wild. Yeah, if you've ever felt, you know, overwhelmed by trying to get the right answer on your first try, this story is absolutely for you. It's an incredible journey through the history of science. We are exploring the legacy of an extinct creature officially known in the scientific literature as Palliornous Clifty Eye. At our mission today is to trace how the interpretation of this single fossil has dramatically evolved. It's been fractured and reformed over centuries. It is a brilliant look at how human knowledge is built, debated, and painstakingly revised. Okay, let's unpack this because we really need to set the scene before we get into the Victorian drama of it all. Oh, there's plenty of drama. So much drama. Our core subject for this deep dive is a single humorous, which is an upper arm bone. And this bone was pulled out of the earth in England, specifically from a geological layer known as the Upper Tunbridge Wells San Formation, which dates it perfectly. Exactly. We are talking about the early Cretaceous period, right in the Valengenian age, which puts

2:03this specific physical object at roughly 135 million years old, 135 million years. It was just sitting in the ground for eons, just waiting to completely baffle generations of the world's top scientists. That bafflement is precisely why this deep dive is so valuable for you to consider. This isn't just a list of dry historical dates or some niche paleontological footnote. Definitely not. This single arm bone represents one of the very earliest discoveries of a terrace or ever made in England. That makes it a foundational piece of a highly complicated puzzle. A puzzle everyone wanted to be the one to solve. Yes, and when you understand the chaotic history of this bone, you understand the scientific method itself. You see the flaws, the ego clashes of early naturalists, and the eventual rigorous corrections that bring us closer to reality. So let's travel back to the 1830s and 1840s to meet the person who pulled this puzzle piece out of the ground. Gideon Mantell. Mantell's quite the figure. He makes this initial discovery, looks at this ancient upper arm bone, and comes to a highly

3:05confident conclusion in his publications from 1837 and 1844. He announces to the scientific establishment that he has found a prehistoric bird, a bird. A bird. Sometimes it polyornous cliff-de-eye. Now going back to that puzzle analogy we mentioned earlier, it is essentially like finding a single corner piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle, seeing a tiny patch of blue on it and telling the world, I have solved it. This is a picture of the ocean. When in reality it's a picture of the sky. Exactly. He guessed the whole picture wrong based on one fragment. What's fascinating here is how the early scientific community began to course correct, even back in the mid 19th century. They didn't just let it slide. No, they didn't. Mantell was undeniably confident, but science, even in the 1840s, relied on collaborative scrutiny. By the late 1840s and 1850s, other scientists started looking at that exact same physical bone. They wanted to see it for themselves. Right. A scientist named Gebel examined it in 1847.

4:07Then another incredibly prominent and somewhat notoriously competitive figure, Richard Owen, detailed it in publications in 1846 and 1859. Richard Owen is always in the middle of these historical debates. Always. And they both looked at Mantell's supposed prehistoric bird bone and realized it wasn't a bird at all. It was a terrasor, a flying reptile, which is a pretty massive taxonomic pivot. You have to wonder how Mantell felt about his peers publicly declaring great job finding that ancient bird, except it's actually a giant flying reptile. Probably that great. But of course, this was the Wild West of early paleontology. They couldn't just gently correct his work and leave it at that. They had to plant their own flags. Which leads to the synonym soup. Massive synonym soup. Gebel decides to name the exact same bone, teradactylist or philness in 1847. Then Owen comes along and says, no, I'm going to call it teradactylist sylvestris. And this reflects the truly chaotic early days of the field. You have to remember the context of the era. No internet. No internet. No centralized global database of fossils.

5:09Every new set of eyes that looked at this upper arm bone brought their own biases, their own interpretations, and their own brand new classification. Everyone wanted to be the discoverer. Exactly. And terosaurs in particular are notoriously difficult to classify, because in order to fly, their bones had to be incredibly light, hollow, and fragile. So they don't fossilize well. Over 135 million years, those all the bones tend to get crushed flat in the earth. Yeah. So these early scientists were looking at flattened, fragmented evidence and tried to fit this very early English discovery into their own individual frameworks. It was a race to name and claim the ancient world. Here's where it gets really interesting though. If you look at the official taxonomic registries today, right now, the recognized name of this creature is pallyornous glyftii. But the word pallyornous is always written in quotation marks. Always. Always. When I first encountered that in the historical data, I thought it was a formatting error. Why is a scientific name wearing permanent air quotes? Because we have a parakeet problem. A parakeet problem.

6:10That is the perfect way to summarize it. It really is. So back in 1825, a scientist named Viggers had already used the genus name pallyornous to describe a group of parakeets. Which are modern birds. Right. Now, those parakeets are currently considered a synonym of the genus tetacula, but the core issue remains. The name pallyornous was already taken. It was off the board. Mantel had accidentally stolen a name that belonged to a cute modern bird to name his fossil that he mistakenly thought was an ancient bird, but was actually a prehistoric flying reptile. It is a comedy of errors. It really is. And Mantel was actually aware of this naming collision. The historical records show that in some of his later publications, specifically around 1848, he tried to fix his mistake. He tried to fix it. He attempted to subtly tweak the name to pallyornous as a replacement. Wait, if he knew he messed up the name entirely, why didn't you just start over from scratch? Why I tried to sneak an ITH in there. It's very subtle. It seems like such a lazy fix.

7:12Just oops. Let me slide a couple of letters in the middle, nobody will notice. It does seem like a quick fix, but unfortunately from Mantel, the rules of scientific nomenclature are incredibly strict, deeply complex, and sometimes very frustrating. I can imagine. There's a rigid concept in taxonomy called a preoccupied name. If a name has been validly published for one organism, like figures did with the parakeet in 1825, it cannot be found. It cannot be used for any other organism ever again. Even if the first one gets renamed. Even if that first organism gets reclassified later down the line, it is a locked door. So Mantel's original name was completely invalid from the very moment he sent it to the printer. But the scientific community still uses it today, just with those quotation marks. Yes, and that connects to a much broader point for you, the listener, about how rigid systems have to handle legacy data. Modern science has to track the unbroken history of an idea. Even a flawed one. You have to know where the idea came from. Exactly. So to acknowledge that this bone has historically been discussed under Mantel's name for over

8:15a century, but to simultaneously flag that the name is scientifically illegal because of the 1825 parakeet, they use the quotation marks. It's like a warning label. It's shorthand for the fossil, formerly an incorrectly known as peliornus. The name peliornus cliffty is essentially locked in a permanent state of taxonomic limbo. A ghost name. A ghost name that haunts the literature, wearing those quotation marks in a permanent badge of its own complicated history. It is like the fossil has a permanent criminal record in the scientific database. So we leave the mid-1800s. The fossil is definitely a tarisore, not a bird. It has a stolen name. It has a bunch of rival names from competing scientists. It's a mess. You would think the scientific community would sit down, look closely at the bone, and sort it out definitively. Instead, we enter what we can call the century of confusion, spanning roughly from the late 1800s all the way to the 1970s. And this era is characterized by an intense desire to categorize everything neatly, sometimes

9:17at the vast expense of solid physical evidence. We see this perfectly in the next phase of the timeline. A scientist named Lidecker in 1888, and later Hulee in 1914, took a look at our lonely little arm bone and tentatively referred the specimen to the genus Ornithocirus. They started calling it Ornithocirus Clifty, which on the surface sounds like progress. It sounds official. It sounds like they finally found its correct family tree and put the mystery to rest. It does sound official until you look at the actual physical methodology they were using. The actual science. The historical data highlights a critical, almost unbelievable flaw in this logic. Our bone, the specific physical object we've been tracking, which holds the official museum designation of holotype specimen, NHM-UK-2353-2353A, didn't actually share any overlapping parts with the holotype of the Ornithocirus type species. To put that in perspective for you, a holotype is the absolute gold standard specimen used to define a newly discovered species.

10:18If you want to claim your random bone belongs to a specific species, you have to compare it directly to the holotype of that species. You need a one-to-one comparison. It is like trying to prove two cars are the exact same make and model, but you only have a steering wheel for the first car. And a back left tire for the second car. Exactly. You literally cannot make a direct physical comparison. There is zero overlap, yet they lump them together anyway. If we connect this to the bigger picture, isn't it while how human psychology operates, even within the strict, supposedly objective bounds of science? We just want things to make sense. Just like the rest of us, crave order. They have a deep, fundamental need to make data make sense and fit into neat little boxes. During this Victorian and early 20th century period, there was a major tendency to use certain well-known genera, like Ornithocirus, as a waste basket-taxon. A waste basket-taxon. It is the scientific equivalent of that one miscellaneous junk drawer we all have in our

11:19kitchens. Yes, the junk drawer. You really know where the spare batteries, the random rubber bands, and the paper clips are supposed to go, so you just shove them all in that drawer and hope for the best. That's exactly what they did. If you had a fragmentary tarisor fossil from roughly the right geological time in place, and you didn't know what to do with it, you just tossed it into the Ornithocirus bucket. They were forcing data into existing categories just to keep the filing system tidy, even if the physical evidence didn't truly support the connection. And this precarious filing system held together for decades. Thousands of researchers just accepted the junk drawer. Until finally, in 1978, a scientist named Welmhoffer comes along. He actually looks at the drawer. He critically examines the bone. He looks at the glaring lack of overlapping physical evidence with the holotype, and he basically just throws his hand up. He officially referred the fossil to Ornithocaridae insertisitis. Insertisitis. It sounds incredibly dignified. It does. It's literally just fancy scientific Latin for uncertain placement.

12:20It's the official peer-reviewed way of saying, we have absolutely no idea where this thing actually belongs. After more than a century of incredibly confident guessing, from Mendel's prehistoric bird to Owen's flying reptile to Hoolie's Ornithocaris, Welmhoffer finally hit the brakes and admitted that they simply didn't know. Which is actually a very brave and structurally necessary step in the scientific method. It takes courage to say, I don't know. Being ignorance is the absolute prerequisite for gaining new knowledge. By pulling it out of the Ornithocaris waste basket and labeling it insertisitis, Welmhoffer essentially wiped the slate clean. He reset the board. He signaled to the next generation of paleontologists that this 135 million-year-old arm bone was an unsolved mystery, completely ripe for re-evaluation with fresh eyes and better technology. And the next generation definitely delivered. This brings us out of the century of confusion and right into the modern era, stretching from the 2000s all the way up to 2025. The modern era changes everything.

13:21Modern science steps in, but now they are equipped with vastly better comparative frameworks, massive digitized databases, and a much deeper nuanced understanding of tarisore anatomy. They take one look at those old Victorian theories and realize how far off base they were. The pace of discovery really accelerates here, reflecting the modernization of the field. In 2009, a team of researchers, Witten, Martill, and Greene, decided it was time to rigorously re-examine the original type specimen. Not just reading the old papers. Right, they didn't just accept the old notes or the legacy categorizations, they look at the physical fossil itself with modern methodologies, and they realized very quickly that pally-ornous clifty is not an Ornithocarid at all. So they moved it to a completely different taxonomic family called Lonco Dectoday, and what's really compelling is how they did it. The methodology is key. They base this new placement on physical similarities to other humary, other upper-arm bones that had actually been assigned to the genus Lonco Dects by Huley way back in 1914.

14:23So the vital clues were there all along? Hiding in plain sight in different parts of the museum archives, just waiting for someone to connect the dots. They finally found the matching steering wheel to use your earlier analogy. But of course, the story didn't stop there. Taxonomies never truly settled as long as active research is being conducted. It's a continuous process. In 2012, and again in 2014, a researcher named Avarianoff was conducting a massive reassessment of another terrorist war genus called Ornithostoma. And while he was deep in that research, he reviewed our controversial little arm bone. And the taxonomic ping-pong continues. Avarianoff decides it belongs to a major clade called Azdarkwaitia, though he leaves its specific placement as indeterminate within that broader group. So just to recap this wild ride. Please do. We have gone from a bird to a generic flying reptile to an Ornithocarris junk drawer to, we don't know, to a long cadet today, and now to an Azdarkwaitia. This raises an important question. At what point do we finally pin this fossil down with modern certainty?

15:26Because moving our upper arm bone into the Azdarkwaitia clade is highly significant. It really is. That specific group is famous for including some of the absolute largest flying annals of all time. Having it there completely shifts how we understand its evolutionary relationships and its ecological role in the early quotacious environment of England. Well to answer your question about when we finally pin it down, how about the year 2025? Because the research provides one final triumphant update to this saga. Right into the present day. Just this year, researchers Commiss and McDavid published a massive phylogenetic analysis. And for anyone who isn't spending their weekends reading taxonomic journals, they essentially built a massive evolutionary family tree. Using incredible modern tools. They used a computer algorithm to compare hundreds of tiny specific bone features across dozens of different species to mathematically determine who is related to who. They crunched all the modern data, looked at all the evolutionary traits, and they finally recovered our much debated bone as a sister taxon to a family called tapajardi, sitting

16:31right there within the Azdarkwaitia clade. A sister taxon to tapajardi. That is an incredibly specific and meaningful classification. It's very precise. Tapajards are known for their bizarre, elaborate head crests and very distinctive beak shapes. By placing our 135 million year old arm bone as a close relative to that specific group, Thomas and McDavid have given it an incredibly precise evolutionary address. It is no longer lost in the junk drawer. Exactly. So what does this all mean? This single isolated piece of bone from its discovery in 1837 all the way to a high-tech computer analysis in 2025. What is the ultimate takeaway from almost two centuries of taxonomic ping pong? If I were to sit the size this entire timeline for you, the core message is that science is never done. We so often think of scientific facts as these static, unchangeable monuments printed in textbooks. Like they're carved in stone. The saga of pallyornous cliff die perfectly illustrates that knowledge is a living, breathing process of continuous, sometimes agonizing refinement.

17:33Mantel wasn't foolish for thinking it was a bird. Not at all. He was working with the incredibly limited context and tools of 1837. Lidecker wasn't malicious for forcing it into the Ornitho-Carris waste basket. He was using the standard categorization methods of 1888. They were just doing their best with what they had. It took the collective generational effort of Giebel Owen-Hulie, Willenhofer, Witten, Avarianov, Thomas McDavid, and countless other unnamed researchers to slowly painstakingly chisel away the errors and inch closer to the truth. Science isn't about being perfectly right on the first try. It is about the fundamental willingness to be corrected by the next generation. That is a deeply reassuring perspective, and I want to connect this directly back to you, the listener. We live in an age of absolute intense information overload. We really do. You are constantly bombarded with sweeping claims, breaking studies, conflicting headlines, and massive data sets. It can feel paralyzing. It can feel like if you don't understand a complex topic perfectly and immediately you

18:36are falling behind. But you aren't. Just remember this 135 million-year-old upper-arm bone, it is a brilliant tangible reminder that it is entirely okay not to have the perfect answer on the first try. It took the greatest minds in the global scientific community nearly two centuries, multiple re-evaluations, a stolen parakeet name, and a whole lot of professional arguing just to figure out where one single piece of a puzzle belonged. Progress is messy. It involves a lot of wrong turns, and that is exactly how the process is supposed to work. It really is. And as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you with a lingering thought to mull over on your own time. What's here? We've just seen how a single fragmented arm bone, initially pulled from the English dirt in the 1830s, can still be yielding brand new, highly specific, scientific classifications as recently as 2025, simply because we develop better tools and better ways of looking at it. Just by looking closer. So, think about this. What else is sitting quietly in the countless dusty drawers of our global museum archives

19:37right now, just waiting for someone to walk in, look at it with fresh eyes, and completely rewrite its story? The puzzle is never truly finished. Keep looking for those pieces, stay curious, and we will catch you on the next deep dive. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode, and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, and hundreds more. Check your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.