''Maehary'' (meaning "one who looks to the sky" in Guaraní) is a genus of pterosauromorph from the

Late Triassic The Late Triassic is the third and final epoch (geology), epoch of the Triassic geologic time scale, Period in the geologic time scale, spanning the time between annum, Ma and Ma (million years ago). It is preceded by the Middle Triassic Epoch ...

(

Norian The Norian is a division of the Triassic Period. It has the rank of an age (geochronology) or stage (chronostratigraphy). It lasted from ~227 to million years ago. It was preceded by the Carnian and succeeded by the Rhaetian. Stratigraphic defi ...

) Caturrita Formation of

Rio Grande do Sul Rio Grande do Sul (, , ; "Great River of the South") is a Federative units of Brazil, state in the South Region, Brazil, southern region of Brazil. It is the Federative_units_of_Brazil#List, fifth-most-populous state and the List of Brazilian st ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. The genus contains a single species, ''M. bonapartei'', known from a partial skull and fragmentary

postcrania Postcrania (postcranium, adjective: postcranial) in zoology and vertebrate paleontology is all or part of the skeleton apart from the skull. Frequently, fossil remains, e.g. of dinosaurs or other extinct tetrapods, consist of partial or isolated sk ...

Discovery and naming

The ''Maehary''

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...

specimen, CAPPA/UFSM 0300, was discovered sometime between 2002 and 2005 in layers of the Caturrita Formation (Linha São Luiz Site, Candelária Sequence, Santa Maria Supersequence) near

Faxinal do Soturno Faxinal do Soturno is a municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. See also *List of municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul This is a list of the municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), located in the South Region of Br ...

, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The holotype consists of a partial skull,

vertebral centra The spinal column, a defining synapomorphy shared by nearly all vertebrates,Hagfish are believed to have secondarily lost their spinal column is a moderately flexible series of vertebrae (singular vertebra), each constituting a characteristic ...

, and fragmentary

scapula The scapula (plural scapulae or scapulas), also known as the shoulder blade, is the bone that connects the humerus (upper arm bone) with the clavicle (collar bone). Like their connected bones, the scapulae are paired, with each scapula on eithe ...

. Another specimen has also been assigned to the genus, UFRGS-PV-0769-T, which consists of a left

maxilla The maxilla (plural: ''maxillae'' ) in vertebrates is the upper fixed (not fixed in Neopterygii) bone of the jaw formed from the fusion of two maxillary bones. In humans, the upper jaw includes the hard palate in the front of the mouth. The t ...

and was previously referred to '' Faxinalipterus''. The specimen was originally described in 2010 as belonging to the supposed basal pterosaur '' Faxinalipterus''.J. F. Bonaparte, C. L. Schultz, and M. B. Soares. (2010). Pterosauria from the Late Triassic of southern Brazil. In S. Bandyopadhyay (ed.), ''New Aspects of Mesozoic Biodiversity, Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences'' 132:63-71. However, when ''Faxinalipterus'' was reinterpreted as a

lagerpetid Lagerpetidae (; originally Lagerpetonidae) is a family of basal avemetatarsalians. Though traditionally considered the earliest-diverging dinosauromorphs (reptiles closer to dinosaurs than to pterosaurs), fossils described in 2020 suggest that ...

in 2022, the snout was removed from its hypodigm and reidentified as belonging to ''Maehary''. In 2022, Kellner ''et al''. described ''Maehary bonapartei'' as a new genus and species of pterosauromorph. The generic name, "''Maehary''" is derived from the Guarani-Kaiowa phrase "Ma’ehary", roughly translating to "who looks to the sky", in reference to the pterosauromorph affinities of the taxon. The

specific name Specific name may refer to: * in Database management systems, a system-assigned name that is unique within a particular database In taxonomy, either of these two meanings, each with its own set of rules: * Specific name (botany), the two-part (bino ...

, "''bonapartei''", honors the Argentine paleontologist

José F. Bonaparte José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced differently in each language: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ). In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , is an old vernacul ...

Classification

Kellner ''et al''. (2022) recovered ''Maehary'' as the earliest diverging member of Pterosauromorpha. The results of their phylogenetic analysis are shown below:

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q111821206 Late Triassic reptiles Late Triassic reptiles of South America Triassic Brazil Fossils of Brazil Fossil taxa described in 2022 Pterosauromorpha Paraná Basin