This Fossil Friday features the reconstructed skeleton of the pterosaur Thalassodromeus sethi from the Lower Cretaceous Santana Formation in Northeast Brazil. This animal must have been a very impressive sight to behold with its estimated wing span of 17 feet and its enormous skull that was 56 inch long and "crowned" with a large crest.

In 2013 two scientists reported about a new species, Thalassodromus sebesensis, from the Upper Cretaceous Sebeş Formation in the Transylvanian Basin of Romania (Grellet-Tinner et al. 2013), which they described two years later (Grellet-Tinner & Codrea 2015) based on a single bone that supposedly represents a premaxillary crest. The authors commented that "without doubts, T. sebesensis is one of the most significant pterosaur discoveries in Romania" because it is "an out of place and out of time Gondwanan tapejarid pterosaur." The authors also built some elaborate evolutionary hypotheses on this discovery: for example they considered the small size of this new species Thalassodromus species as caused by island dwarfism on the ancient Haţeg Island. Because of associated plant fossils they speculated about a co-evolution of tapejarid pterosaurs with flowering plants, and interpreted T. sebesensis as a forest dweller. Isn't it really astonishing what a single bone allegedly can tell us about the past?

In the very same journal a large team of twenty other scientists (Dyke et al. 2015), including leading experts like Stephen Brusatte, Darren Naish, Mark Norell, and Mark Witten, immediately responded to the sensational discovery and strongly disputed its identification as a pterosaur remain. Instead they present convincing arguments that the bone represents nothing but a piece of the ventral shell (plastron) of the fossil turtle Kallokibotion bajadizi from the Upper Cretaceous of Romania. That a turtle shell can be misinterpreted as the jaw of a flying reptile by academic scientists who studied their field for years is quite a revelation about the limits of fossil data as well as the limits of researchers. The critics do not mince their words and concluded: "Based on their incorrect identification of ODA-28 as a pterosaur crest, GTC built a classic 'house of cards' scenario: the misidentification of one fragmentary fossil leading to a cascade of elaborate ideas with increasingly far-reaching implications." Bummer! In spite of this devastating critique, the original authors still defended their interpretation as a tapejarid pterosaur. They boldly stated that "the comment of Dyke and his close-knit collaborators with their respective students may actually be most premature, as they were clearly formulated without examining the fossils" and presented this conclusion:

It is rather transparent that [the] Dyke et al. comment rests on assumptions (the main text) and predictions (the conclusion) rather than on first hand examinations with ensuing interpretations. Hence, considering their erroneous interpretations of the several above-mentioned UBB ODA-28 anatomical features, our conclusions are 1) that UBB ODA-28 is presently justified as a new pterosaur species coined T. sebesensis, and 2) Dyke et al.['s] conspicuous persistence, hastiness, and zeal of writing this comment, may indeed reflect of deeper, perhaps irritating, issues in Transylvania.

Irritating issues in Transylvania? What's that supposed to mean, a vampire conspiracy? This more than weird response invited a scathing comment by Mark Witten (2014) titled "Lies, damned lies, and 'Thalassodromeus sebesensis'", which is dated to 2014 because the article and its discussion was already available online a year prior to the printed publication in 2015. The whole affair made a splash in the paleontological community (Black 2014, Peters 2014, Anonymous 2016), which widely agreed with the re-interpretation as a turtle shell (Pêgas et al. 2018).

However, such misidentifications are not restricted to some inexperienced and obscure fringe scientists, but also happen to renowned experts such as one of the world's leading authorities on pterosaurs, Dr. David Unwin from the University of Leicester. Together with his colleague Nicholas Fraser he had described (Fraser & Unwin 1990) two bones from the Upper Triassic of Gloucestershire as the earliest fossil record of pterosaurs in Britain. They even identified the material as belonging to a small new taxon of the superfamily Rhamphorhynchoidea. About 15 years later a re-examination of these "purported pterosaur wing metacarpals from the Upper Triassic of England" by Dalla Veccia & Cau (2014) showed that they did not belong to a pterosaur at all but to a drepanosaurid terrestrial reptile (also see Black 2014), which rather resembled a green iguana (read the Wikipedia page on drepanosaurids to learn about their highly controversial phylogenetic relationships). The latter authors concluded that "there is no definitive evidence of the presence of pterosaurs in the Triassic of the UK." In several previous articles (Bechly 2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2024) I have elaborated on numerous other problems with the origin of pterosaurs and the interpretation of their fossil history.

Do such misidentifications and interpretational problems show that Darwinism is false and intelligent design is true? Of course not, but it shows that fossils are very much data that require a heavy dose of interpretation that can and often does introduce errors. If such misinterpretations are then used as support for far-reaching evolutionary hypotheses, we definitely leave the realm of real science and enter the murky waters of pseudoscientific musings. This is relevant to the question of whether unguided Darwinian evolution is supported by the hard evidence of the fossil record. Spoiler alert: It is not, and all claims about alleged fossil proofs must be taken with a large grain of salt. The hard data of the fossil record may tell us something about the existence of extinct organisms, and of long gone biota, but they are completely silent about the process that brought them into being. What they do show, though, is a pattern of discontinuities and abrupt appearances, which is arguably better explained by intelligent design than by gradual incremental changes of neo-Darwinian evolution (Bechly 2024).