He later accepted that this hypothesis might be incorrect in a 1985 paper on Archaeopteryx.
The known members of the group by the time of its erection was Archaeopteryx and Archaeornis.
In 2012, following pressure from STR, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) announced that many high-school textbooks would be revised to remove certain examples of evolution, such as of the horse and the dinosaur Archaeopteryx.
An eighth, fragmentary specimen of Archaeopteryx was discovered in the late 1980s in the somewhat younger sediments at Daiting.
His interest in dinosaurs led him to write the second of 24 books in the Time Machine series, Search for Dinosaurs, which is actually about finding Archaeopteryx, the first bird.
In the latter function he researched in the field of magnetism and electricity and also bought many fossils, among them the Haarlem specimen of Archaeopteryx.
They also shared the feature of intramandibular articulation, something that is actually absent in Archaeopteryx, but found in many of its theropod relatives.
He is best known for his work on the various fossil specimens of Archaeopteryx or "Urvogel", the first known bird.
It was originally thought to be a close relative of Archaeopteryx, but newer analyses suggests it is more closely related to Confuciusornis (Tweet 2007).
In other words, Puijila is a transitional fossil that provides information about how the seal family returned to the seas, similar to the way that Archaeopteryx illuminates the origin of modern birds.
The quarrying of this lithographic limestone subsequently yielded spectacular finds, including Archaeopteryx, commemorated in the bird's full name Archaeopteryx lithographica.
The first track, "Petrified", argues that evolutionary thinking and Latin nomenclature have poorly captured the charm and dignity of dinosaurs such as the Haplocanthosaur, Pterosaur and Archaeopteryx.
As a scientist, he was the first to distinguish between the genus Archaeopteryx and the genus Archaeornis; he also discovered new characteristics of the genera Tritylodon and Moeritherium.
The museum contains a nearly complete fossil skeleton of the important dinosaur genus Sinosauropteryx (similar to Archaeopteryx) as well as large fossils such as those of a Brachiosaurus and a Hadrosaurus.
Differences between the impressions on slab and counterslab led Fred Hoyle and Lee Spetner in 1985 to declare that some Archaeopteryx fossils had been forged, a claim dismissed by most palaeontologists.
Eduard Opitsch (1 February 1900 — 20 February 1991) was a German quarry owner whose name is associated to a specimen of the prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx, the Maxberg specimen.
Wellnhoferia, a bird closely related to Archaeopteryx, or a species of the Urvogel itself, was named in his honor.
Discovered in the 1960s near Eichstätt, Germany and described in 1988 by Wellnhofer (as a specimen of Archaeopteryx) it is currently located at the Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum in Solnhofen.