Tapejara (from a Tupi word meaning “the old being”) is a genus of Brazilian pterosaur from the Cretaceous Period (Santana Formation, dating to about 108 Ma ago). Tapejara crests consisted of a semicircular crest over the snout, and a bony prong which extended back behind the head.

The type species and only one currently recognized as valid by most researchers, T. wellnhoferi, is the smallest species to have been assigned toTapejara and does not preserve evidence of soft-tissue crest extensions. Thespecific name honours German paleontologist Peter Wellnhofer. A second species, originally named Tapejara imperator (“emperor”), is much larger and possessed a crest made up of distinctively long prongs, projecting from the rounded snout crest and the back of the skull, which supported a large, possibly rounded sail-like crest of keratin. A third species, Tapejara navigans(“sailing”), was mid-sized and sported a similar crest to T. imperator, though narrower and more dome-shaped, that lacked the backwards-pointing bony support prong.

Several studies in 2007 showed that T. imperator and T. navigans are too different from T. wellnhoferi and therefore require their own genus names. The species T. imperator was given its own genus, Tupandactylus, by Kellner and Campos.^[1] Unwin and Martill found thatT. imperator and T. navigans belong in the same genus, and named them Ingridia imperator and I. navigans, respectively. The genus name honoured Wellnhofer’s late wife Ingrid.^[2] Because Tupandactylus was named first, it retains priority over the name Ingridia. To complicate matters, both the name Tupandactylus and Ingridia used the former Tapejara imperator as their type species.^[3] The scientists who described Tupandactylus did not name aTupandactylus navigans (but instead suggested it was synonymous to Tupandactylus imperator), and Tapejara navigans was not formally reclassified as a distinct species of Tupandactylus until 2011.^[4]

(From Wikipedia, February 2015)