| abstract
| - Few non-dinosaurian animals are as invocative of the Mesozoic as the pterosaurs, the ancient flying reptiles and first flying vertebrates to have ever existed. Pop-cultural "pterodactyls" may look nothing like the ancient flying animals, creatures as sophisticated as the dinosaurs and mammals, but these inaccurate depictions still capture an omnipresent feel of these animals: no primeval scenery is complete without pterosaurs flapping around. In Spec, the history of pterosaur research has probably been one of the most convoluted and bizarre scientific affairs in history. When the first specexplorers ventured into, well, Spec, they weren't treated to ancient landscapes with skies filled with "pterodactyls". Few were shocked: for the longest time, it had been thought that pterosaurs were declining in the latest Mesozoic, and even as new research showed a higher diversity of terminal Mesozoic forms than previously thought, to many it was simply the confirmation of an inevitable reality. A skull dating from the Palaeocene - one of the very first Spec fossils found - found in a random Pacific Northwest beach was revealed soon after; crowned *Gigantala cranitus*, it was for a while considered the last of Spec's pterosaurs. However, after research started being conducted in more landmasses, and as closer inspections of Spec's habitats began, pterosaurs were in fact confirmed to be in Spec. First, the expected azhdarchids showed up, fairly conservative after 66 million years of evolution, followed by the tremendously derived australian carnocursorids (for the longest time assumed to be azhdarchids). This was followed by unexpected discoveries: two clades of previously "thought to be long gone" pterosaurs were discovered (though, since one of said clades was previously known to have survived as recently as the Turonian and both were fairly cryptic and poorly understood in HE's fossil reccord to begin with, in retrospect such amazement wouldn't have been warranted), clades that not only survived, but surprisingly diversified considerably. Finally, Spec's researchers had the confirmation that nyctosaurs are indeed still around, in washed up carcasses. In total, 60 pterosaur species have been discovered, though the number is still increasing, and might indeed do so very significantly the more we research the pelagic nyctosaurs. The exact flux of pterosaurian diversity after the Late Cretaceous is not clear, as the fossil reccord follows similar trends, but in the laggerstate rich fossil reccord of the Eocene we do observe an immense variety of forms, including groups such as ctenochasmatoids and chaoyangopterids, displaying a morphological diversity not seen since the Lower Cretaceous. The Oligocene is poor outside of ornithocheirid and carnocursorid fossils - the latter mostly from Riversleigh -, but the Miocene depicts a fairly diverse variety, with eastern Europe in particular showcasing a wide variety of genera. Of the Miocene pterosaur forms, only ornithocheirids are absent in the present, with the last remains being mid-Plestocene japanese and New Zealand subfossils.
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