The actual date of the specimen's discovery and entry into the collection is unknown however, and it was not mentioned in a catalogue of the collection taken in 1767, so it must have been acquired at some point between that date and its 1784 description by Collini.
The specimen had been given to the collection by Count italics=unset|Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim around 1780, having been recovered from a lithographic limestone quarry in italics=unset|Eichstätt.
The first Pterodactylus specimen was described by the Italian scientist italics=unset|Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784, based on a fossil skeleton that had been unearthed from the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria.
The actual date of the specimen's discovery and entry into the collection is unknown however, and it was not mentioned in a catalogue of the collection taken in 1767, so it must have been acquired at some point between that date and its 1784 description by Collini.
Back in March 1800, Hermann alerted the prominent French scientist Georges Cuvier to the existence of Collini's fossil, believing that it had been captured by the occupying armies of Napoleon and sent to the French collections in Paris (and perhaps to Cuvier himself) as war booty; at the time special French political commissars systematically seized art treasures and objects of scientific interest.
Cuvier agreed with this interpretation, and at Hermann's suggestion, Cuvier became the first to publish these ideas in December 1800 in a very short description.
Rather, in 1802, following the death of Charles Theodore, it was brought to Munich, where Baron Johann Paul Carl von Moll had obtained a general exemption of confiscation for the Bavarian collections.
In 1809 Cuvier published a somewhat longer description, in which he named the animal Petro-Dactyle, this was a typographical error however, and was later corrected by him to Ptéro-Dactyle.
Cuvier remarked: "It is not possible to doubt that the long finger served to support a membrane that, by lengthening the anterior extremity of this animal, formed a good wing." Contrary to von Moll's report, the fossil was not missing; it was being studied by Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, who gave a public lecture about it on December 27, 1810.
In January 1811, von Sömmerring wrote a letter to Cuvier deploring the fact that he had only recently been informed of Cuvier's request for information.
His lecture was published in 1812, and in it von Sömmerring named the species Ornithocephalus antiquus.
It was not until 1817 that a second specimen of Pterodactylus came to light, again from Solnhofen.
The idea that pterosaurs were aquatic animals persisted among a minority of scientists as late as 1830, when the German zoologist Johann Georg Wagler published a text on "amphibians" which included an illustration of Pterodactylus using its wings as flippers.
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