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Our understanding of the evolutionary transition between basal, predominantly long-tailed forms to derived short-tailed pterodactyloids remained poor until the discovery of<jats:italic>Wukongopterus<\/jats:italic>and<jats:italic>Darwinopterus<\/jats:italic>in western Liaoning, China. In this paper we report on a new genus and species,<jats:italic>Douzhanopterus zhengi<\/jats:italic>, that has a reduced tail, 173% the length of the humerus, and a reduced fifth pedal digit, whose first phalange is ca. 20% the length of metatarsal III, both unique characters to Monofenestra. The morphological comparisons and phylogenetic analysis presented in this paper demonstrate that<jats:italic>Douzhanopterus<\/jats:italic>is the sister group to the \u2018Painten pro-pterodactyloid\u2019 and the Pterodactyloidea, reducing the evolutionary gap between long- and short-tailed pterosaurs.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/srep42763","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,2,16]],"date-time":"2017-02-16T10:03:56Z","timestamp":1487239436000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":17,"title":["New evidence from China for the nature of the pterosaur evolutionary transition"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"7","author":[{"given":"Xiaoli","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Shunxing","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Junqiang","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xin","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xuefeng","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yameng","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Guangjin","family":"Wei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xiaolin","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,2,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"BFsrep42763_CR1","unstructured":"Wellnhofer, P. 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