Arthurdactylus is a genus of pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation of northeastern Brazil. It was a large animal, with a wingspan of 4.6 metres (15 ft). It was in 1994 named by and David Martill in honor of Arthur Conan Doyle, who featured large reptilian pterosaurs in his novel The Lost World, about a professor finding prehistoric animals still alive on a plateau in South-America. They first spelled the species name as Arthurdactylus conan-doylei, thus with a forbidden diacritic sign, and themselves carried out the necessary emendation to conandoylei in 1998. The holotype is SMNK 1132 PAL, a reasonably complete skeleton, lacking only a skull, neck, sternum and some caudal vertebrae. The specimen, adult or nearly so, was preserved on a plate and is slightly cr