the diversity in taxa, including Phosphatodraco, in the Ouled Abdoun Basin, which dates to the late Maastrichtian, right before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, indicates their extinction happened abruptly. Discovery During the late 1990s, remains of pterosaurs began to be discovered in different fossil localities of Morocco, all dating to the Cretaceous period. In 2000, pterosaur fossils were found by the Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP, located in Casablanca) during paleontological field work in the eastern part of the Ouled Abdoun Phosphatic Basin near the city of Khouribga in central Morocco. They were collected from "site 1" in the Sidi Daoui mine in the northern part of Grand Daoui, an area in which phosphate is quarried. The fossils were found in the upper part of the stratigraphic unit which miners called "couche III". These excavations were part of a collaboration between the OCP, the Ministère de L'Energie et des Mines, Rabat, and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which had taken place since 1997. The pterosaur material, catalogued as specimen OCP DEK/GE 111, consists of five disarticulated but closely associated cervical (neck) vertebrae and an indeterminate bone, most likely belonging to a single individual. The vertebrae are crushed and damaged, and the surface of the bone is missing in some areas, with some infilling of phosphate sediments, and the fossils have therefore not been removed from the matrix. The block containing the bones is long and wide. During mechanical preparation of the specimen fossil remains of other animals were also found in association, including of several types of fish and mosasaurs. The specimen was made the holotype of the new genus and species Phosphatodraco mauritanicus by paleontologist Xabier Pereda-Suberbiola and colleagues in 2003. The genus name derives from the words phosphate and the Latin draco, meaning "dragon from the phosphates", and the specific name refers to the region of Mauretania where the fossils were found. The describers gave the etymology of Mauretania as Latin for North Africa; other sources specify it as an area stretching from Algeria to Morocco. Phosphatodraco was the first Late Cretaceous pterosaur known from North Africa (and thus the first known member of the family Azhdarchidae of this age from the region), and only the second pterosaur genus described from Morocco (the first being Siroccopteryx). At the time it was described, it was one of the only known azhdarchids preserving a relatively complete neck (the