of confiscation for the Bavarian collections. Cuvier asked von Moll to study the fossil but was informed it could not be found. 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. He also refuted a hypothesis by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that it would have been a shore bird. 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. The animal was described as being both a bat, and a form in between mammals and birds, i.e. not intermediate in descent but in "affinity" or archetype. Cuvier disagreed, and the same year in his Ossemens fossiles provided a lengthy description in which he restated that the animal was a reptile. It was not until 1817 that a second specimen of Pterodactylus came to light, again from Solnhofen. This tiny specimen was that year described by von Sömmerring as Ornithocephalus brevirostris, named for its short snout, now understood to be a juvenile character (this specimen is now thought to represent a juvenile specimen of a different genus, probably Ctenochasma). He provided a restoration of the skeleton, the first one published for any pterosaur. This restoration was very inaccurate, von Sömmerring mistaking the long metacarpals for the bones of the lower arm, the lower arm for the humerus, this upper arm for the breast bone and this sternum again for the shoulder blades. Sömmerring did not change his opinion that these forms were bats and this "bat model" for interpreting pterosaurs would remain influential long after a consensus had been reached around 1860 that they were reptiles. The standard assumptions were that pterosaurs were quadrupedal, clumsy on the ground, furred, warmblooded and had a wing membrane reaching the ankle. Some of these elements have been confirmed, some refuted by modern research, while