Wellnhoferia is a genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 of early prehistoric bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 closely related to Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx , sometimes referred to by its German name Urvogel , is a genus of theropod dinosaur that is closely related to birds. The name derives from the Ancient Greek meaning "ancient", and , meaning "feather" or "wing"...

. It lived in what is now Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, during the Late Jurassic

Jurassic

The Jurassic is a geologic period and system that extends from about Mya to  Mya, that is, from the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Cretaceous. The Jurassic constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic era, also known as the age of reptiles. The start of the period is marked by...

. While Wellnhoferia was similar to Archaeopteryx, it had a shorter tail and its fourth toe was shorter than in Archaeopteryx. Andrzej Elżanowski

Andrzej Elżanowski

Andrzej Elżanowski is a Polish paleontologist and vertebrate zoologist specializing in bird phylogeny. Together with Peter Wellnhofer he described a coelurosaur theropod Archaeornithoides in 1992...

 (2001) of the Institute of Zoology of the University of Wrocław, Poland, determined the differences resulted from a "phylogenetic reduction rather than individual variation."
The type specimen is the Solnhofen Specimen of Archaeopteryx (BSP 1999). Discovered in the 1960s near Eichstätt

Eichstätt

Eichstätt is a town in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany, and capital of the District of Eichstätt. It is located along the Altmühl River, at , and had a population of 13,078 in 2002. It is home to the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the lone Catholic university in Germany. The...

, Germany and described in 1988 by Wellnhofer (as a specimen of Archaeopteryx) it is currently located at the Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum

Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum

The Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum is a natural history museum in Solnhofen, Germany. It was founded in 1954, when the mayor Friedrich Mueller brought his private collection to the public...

 in Solnhofen

Solnhofen

Solnhofen is a municipality in the district of Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen in the region of Franconia in the Land of Bavaria in Germany. It lies within the Altmühl valley....

. It was originally classified as a Compsognathus

Compsognathus

Compsognathus was a small, bipedal, carnivorous theropod dinosaur. The animal was the size of a turkey and lived around 150 million years ago, the early Tithonian stage of the late Jurassic Period, in what is now Europe. Paleontologists have found two well-preserved fossils, one in Germany...

by an amateur collector.

Although Elżanowski found significant differences between Wellnhoferia and Archaeopteryx, one later study (Mayr et al. (2007)) found Wellnhoferia was a specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica. Senter and Robins (2003), however, supported Elżanowski's naming of a new genus.

External links

• The Paleobiology Database (Search Fossil collection records for taxon name Wellnhoferia)