Pteranodon
While the first "Pteranodon" wing bones were collected by Marsh and Cope in the early 1870s, the first "Pteranodon" skull was found on May 2, 1876, along the Smoky Hill River in Wallace County (now Logan County), Kansas, USA, by Samuel Wendell Williston, a fossil collector working for Marsh. A second, smaller skull soon was discovered as well. These skulls showed that the North American pterosaurs were different from any European species, in that they lacked teeth and had bony crests on their skulls. Marsh recognized this major difference, describing the specimens as "distinguished from all previously known genera of the order Pterosauria by the entire absence of teeth." Marsh recognized that this characteristic warranted a new genus, and he coined the name "Pteranodon" ("wing without tooth") in 1876. Marsh reclassified all the previously named North American species from "Pterodactylus" to "Pteranodon". He considered the smaller skull to belong to "Pteranodon occidentalis", based on its size. Marsh classified the larger skull, YPM 1117, in the new species "Pteranodon longiceps", which he thought to be a medium-sized species in between the small "P. occidentalis" and the large "P. ingens". Marsh also named several additional species: Pteranodon comptus and "Pteranodon nanus" were named for fragmentary skeletons of small individuals, while "Pteranodon gracilis" was based on a wing bone that he mistook for a pelvic bone. He soon realized his mistake, and re-classified that specimen again into a separate genus, which he named "Nyctosaurus". "P, nanus" was also later recognized as a "Nyctosaurus" specimen.
Stephen L. Brusatte
Brusatte has discovered more than a dozen new species of vertebrate fossils. His breakthrough in the study of dinosaur fossils was while at the University of Chicago with Paul Sereno. Having discovered the skull, jaw and neck fossils of a 95-million-year-old theropod in the Elrhaz Formation of Niger in 1997, Sereno was looking for a competent student to analyse it. Brusatte took the opportunity in 2004, completed the project in 2005, and published his findings in 2007 with Sereno. The animal was found to be a new species of "Carcharodontosaurus", which they named "C. iguidensis". He estimated that the complete skull would be more than five feet long, one of the biggest skulls of a known carnivorous dinosaur. This was followed by the description of another new theropod from the Elrhaz Formation in January 2008, "Kryptops palaios". Another significant discovery was from China in 2014. Alongside Chinese paleontologist Lü Junchang and others, Brusatte described a 66-million-year-old dinosaur, "Qianzhousaurus sinensis", which was closely related to the famous "T. rex". Due to its long snout, it was given the nickname "Pinocchio rex".