It is known only from a partial right lower leg (specimen BMNH A1588), which its original describers believed came from a giant owl.
Initially, Elopteryx was described from its holotype, a proximal left femur, specimen BMNH A1234.
BMNH |
The type specimens were collected there by the 1820s Beechey expedition and described by the English entomologist Francis Walker in 1864; they are now in the BMNH.
Its fossil, holotype BMNH 42997 (now NHM R 42997), a part of a right femur, 312 mm long, was found in the Netherlands near Maastricht, and originally described as a new species of Megalosaurus in 1883 by Harry Seeley: M. bredai, honouring the late Dutch biologist and geologist Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda, a director of the Teylers Museum, who had collected the fossil at some time between 1820 and 1860 from the chalkstone quarry at the St Pietersberg.
Part of the British Museum of Natural History collection was specimen BMNH 46321, a pair of spike bases found in the Kimmeridge Clay by William Cunnington near the Great Western Railway cutting near Wootton Bassett.
In 2010, Kenneth Carpenter and Yusuke Ishida synonymized Dollodon bampingi with Iguanodon seelyi, a species based on BMNH R 28685 from Wessex Formation, England.
In May 2010 the fossils comprising Hypselospinus were by David Norman reclassified as a separate genus, among them the holotype BMNH R1635, consisting of a left ilium, a sacrum, tail vertebrae and teeth.
There are some other, undescribed, presbyornithid or possible presbyornithid remains, such as the partial right scapula BMNH PAL 4989, which was considered part of Headonornis hantoniensis, but cannot be positively refererred to a known taxon, or the Early Cretaceous remains from the Mongolian Barun Goyot Formation at Uday Sayr
The holotype and only known specimen, BMNH R3718, consists of a single left hand bone, discovered around 1905 near Wollaston, on the Lightning Ridge.
The holotype, BMNH R2559 (incorrectly given by Owen as BMNH R2556), was found near Cuckfield in layers of the Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation dating from the late Valanginian.