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The type specimen of the animal now known as "Pterodactylus antiquus" was one of the first pterosaur fossils ever to be identified. The first "Pterodactylus" specimen was described by the Italian scientist Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784, based on a fossil skeleton that had been unearthed from the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria. Collini was the curator of the "Naturalienkabinett", or nature cabinet (a precursor to the modern concept of the natural history museum), in the palace of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria at Mannheim. The specimen had been given to the collection by Count Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim, probably around 1780, having been recovered from a lithographic limestone quarry in Eichstätt. The actual date of the specimen's discovery and entry into the collection is unknown. It was not mentioned in a catalogue of the collection taken in 1767 and so must have been acquired at some point between that date and its 1784 description by Collini. This makes it potentially the earliest documented pterosaur find; the "Pester Exemplar" of "Pterodactylus micronyx" was described in 1779 and possibly discovered earlier than the Mannheim specimen, but it was at first considered to be a fossil crustacean.
Collini, in his first description of the Mannheim specimen, did not conclude that it was a flying animal. In fact, Collini could not fathom what kind of animal it might have been, rejecting affinities with the birds or the bats. He speculated that it may have been a sea creature, not for any anatomical reason, but because he thought the ocean depths were more likely to have housed unknown types of animals. The idea that pterosaurs were aquatic animals persisted among a minority of scientists as late as 1830, when the German zoologist Johann Georg Wagler published a text on "amphibians" which included an illustration of "Pterodactylus" using its wings as flippers. Wagler went so far as to classify "Pterodactylus", along with other aquatic vertebrates (namely plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and monotremes), in the class Gryphi, between birds and mammals.
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