This used to be on Ptero Soarer (now Terror-dactyl), but it was removed. I'm adding it here in case we can salvage some of the paragraphs.
List of Common Inaccuracies in Media
Using the names "pterosaur" and "pterodactyl" as if they were synonyms. "Pterosaur" is used for the total group of the Mesozoic flying "reptiles."note Using "reptile" here in its traditional paraphyletic sense, excluding birds. "Pterodactyl" is either a name for a subgroup of pterosaurs or a genus name for a particular pterosaur, Pterodactylus. To put this into perspective, this would be as bad as calling every primate you met a "gorilla," if referring to the genus name, or "ape," if referring to the subgroup name; while it's acceptable to refer to hominoids as apes, it's not acceptable to refer to primates as a whole as apes, since monkeys, lemurs, lorises, tarsiers and bushbabies aren't apes. In a similar manner, pterodactyloids were indeed an advanced group of pterosaurs and the word "pterodactyl" can be used to refer to them, but "pterodactyl" and "pterosaur" do not mean the same thing.note It's quite telling how pervasive this trope is when spellcheck recognizes "pterodactyl" but not Pteranodon
Designing the pterosaurs with bat-like wings rather than anatomically correct pterosaur ones. This ranges from having leathery wings made of nothing but skin to having the whole wing membrane being supported by all the fingers. In reality, pterosaur wings were made of tougher, more complicated materials and were supported by one finger. They should also attach at the ankle or at the lower leg, not at the hip. Scientific evidence suggests that pterosaurs had curved or smoothwing tips, to avoid the stress of damages during flight.
Essentially, Pterosaurs aren't Dinosaurs. Pterosaurs were closely related to the dinosaurs, being more closely related to each other than to modern crocodiles, but pterosaurs were not dinosaurs themselves. (For comparison, it's like how canines and felines are both in the "Carnivora" group, but dogs are not cats and cats are not dogs.)
Mix-and-Match Critters. Two pterosaur species will be combined into one hybridised design.
Bigger Is Better. The pterosaurs on show will be truly gigantic, far larger than the fossil record can justify. There is some Truth in Television for this belief, as creatures like Quetzalcoatlus currently hold the record for the largest wingspans ever known. However, this is at best 12 metres, and is based on scanty evidence. In fiction, beasts with much larger wingspans are exaggerations.
Toothy Bird trope applied to pterosaurs. Specifically, this is when a pterosaur (like the iconic Pteranodon) is shown having teeth, sometimes a horrifying set of gnashers, instead of a toothless beak (the name "pteranodon" actually means "Toothless wing"). Occasionally this can be reversed when a normally toothy pterosaur (like Rhamphorhynchus) looks like it had a run-in with an angry dentist.
On that note, any and all pterosaurs being depicted with crests. While this was one of the things that made Pteranodon so famous, it should be noted that many pterosaurs lacked crests, and those that did possess them had very differently sized and shaped ones. Additionally, people will often make the mistake of depicting female Pteranodonswith crests like their male counterparts. Female Pteranodons actually had much smaller crests, if not no crests at all. Similarly, a pterosaur that should have a crest in real life would be depicted as crestless. Quetzalcoatlus and Pterodactylus are frequent victims of this, mostly due to Science Marches On.
Pterosaurs in fiction will grab objects with their feetand hoist them into the air, presumably to be carried away and eaten. Pterosaur feet were designed for quadrupedal walking on the ground, or for climbing vertical objects or branch systems depending on the species.note Although that claim is subject to controversy. No known pterosaur had prehensile feet with opposable digits, which makes any depiction of pterosaurs picking humans up with their feet inaccurate. In a similar vein, many works are also guilty of portraying pterosaurs as digitigrade (walking on their toes), rather than plantigrade (walking on their whole foot) as they were in life, with the feet often resembling those of birds, and occasionally giving them an incorrect number of toes on each foot - the correct number should be four (though some primitive ones had five), instead of three (see: Harryhausen's Pteranodon from One Million Years B.C.) or five (see: the Pteranodons from Jurassic Park III).
Interestingly, while many groups of pterosaurs seem to have occupied niches similar to modern birds and bats, (coastal piscivores, stork-like hunters, bat-like insectivores, flamingo-like filter-feeders, etc.), no known group of pterosaurs seems to have evolved to fill the niche of raptor-like aerial predators. While some taxa, like Harpactognathus, Darwinopterus, and Campylognathoides have occasionally been interpreted as eagle-like hunters by certain workers (though if true, they would have been using their jaws instead of their feet for catching prey), many of their colleagues have disagreed with those interpretations.
Giving a pterosaur a bendy, birdlike neck. While the flexibility of a pterosaur's neck varied with the species, none of them had the skinny, pipe-cleaner like necks that some birds have.
Showing Pteranodon coexisting with T. rex is an example of the latter, as although both are from Late Cretaceous North America, Pteranodon died out about 12 million years before T. rex shows up in the fossil record, though pteranodontids similar to it would have been contemporaries of T. rex, and the giant Quetzalcoatlus did indeed coexist with T. rex and many of its famous neighbors like Triceratops.
Showing giant pterosaurs existing in the Jurassic or Triassic. All pterosaurs that grew larger than an eagle were Cretaceous pterodactyloids, and similarly, showing gigantic rhamphorhynchids (the long-tailed variety) is inaccurate, as the biggest known taxa had (at most) a 10-foot wingspan, like Dearc, and most were under 7 feet, while Triassic pterosaurs were even smaller.
Small Taxonomy Pools, perhaps because the creators wanted to avoid the Viewers Are Geniuses trope, because they simply hadn't heard of them, or because they didn't bother to do their homework. Pteranodon is easily the most recognizable of all pterosaurs in popular culture, with Rhamphorhynchus coming a close second. Quetzalcoatlus may get a mention, but the chances of meeting any other pterosaur species in fiction is virtually nil. Dimorphodon of Jurassic World is a rare exception.
Missing pycnofibres (fuzz only known on pterosaurs). Pterosaurs are almost always depicted as scaly, despite the growing evidence that most, if not all, of them had pycnofibres.
Pterosaurs will have an inexplicable desire to attack or kill humans on sight. This one may be justified if the pterosaur in question is a Papa Wolf or a Mama Bear defending its nest, or has some other biologically plausible behaviour, but usually it's as if the pterosaurs have looked up the Humans Are Bastards page in advance — essentially, Pterosaurs Are Dragons. Some of the largest azhdarchids like Hatzegopteryx were large enough to have snatched up a human and swallowed it whole if it were hungry and nothing else of the right size was around.note The animal would be walking or galloping up to you instead of snatching you on the fly.Thalassodromeus was also known to have possessed powerful jaws that could suggest a tendency to prey on large animals.
Speaking of diet, pterosaurs are frequently depicted as exclusive fish- or meat-eaters. As an analogy, modern birds and bats don't ONLY eat fish or other animals, even if some species do. Many of the known pterosaur fossil finds do show that some species ate fish, but pterosaur diets were more diverse; other species fed on insects or smaller land vertebrates (Azdarchids like the aforementioned Hatzegopteryx were in fact most likely terrestrial hunters, rather than vulture-like scavengers as is still suggested in modern media), and some species may have eaten fruit and seeds too.
Expect any fictional pterosaur that lands on the ground to be hopelessly lost. Real pterosaurs were more than capable of walking on firm ground — not only were some of them scarily competent at it, but new evidence now suggests that they could even take off from level ground, using their wings to vault themselves into the air rather like vampire bats do today. Similarly, pterosaurs are frequently depicted as being bipedal like birds; in reality, pterosaurs were quadrupedal, as their musculature is focused on their forelimbs, while their hindlimbs are small, positioned at the very back of their bodies, and quite weak. Pterosaurs are also depicted sprawling or with their limbs straight under their bodies, when they were actually somewhere in between.
On that note, you can expect any fictional pterosaur that finds itself in the water to be rendered temporarily flightless at best, or helplessly drown at worst. This is particularly bad, because not only is it based on nothing, it also has plenty of evidence against it — evidence that isn't even all that recent! In reality, it's been proven by fossilized trackways and oft-forgotten traces of webbing between a fossilized pterosaur's toes that some (though not all) pterosaurs would actually have been very good swimmers, floating on top of the water like ducks or seabirds, with their wings spread flat on the water. In addition, there is ongoing work that strongly suggests most pterosaurs (even those not typically found near aquatic environments) were quite capable of launching from the water if they needed to.note Though it wouldn't have been very easy, as this gif demonstrates.◊ The worst danger they would face in this situation would be the predatory aquatic reptiles that lurk beneath the surface and while they were probably too top-heavy to hold their heads up the same way birds do when they swim, there's no reason to assume that pterosaurs would be completely helpless if they found themselves in the water.
Lacking the pteroid bone;◊ this bone was found on each wing and controlled the front part of it. It was an anatomical feature unique to pterosaurs, as no other animal (living or extinct) has been discovered with anything even remotely similar.
Portraying pterosaurs as birds or the ancestors of birds — while pterosaurs did fly, the actual ancestors of birds were true dinosaurs—more specifically, the maniraptor dinosaurs. Also, pterosaurs will often be shown to take good care of their eggs in the same way as birds, even teaching their young how to fly. But then it was suggested that they more likely simply laid their eggs and were done with that, like a modern lizard (there is a theory that larger pterosaurs would protect their eggs while they were incubating and then dig them out of where they were buried, but even then it was believed that they'd leave the minute the eggs hatched), since fossils of baby pterosaurs show they were capable of flight from birth. However, this idea is also controversial, as today's archosaurs practice parental care and even the ones that are active from hatching, like ostriches and crocodiles, still had their parents looking after them. It would be logical that pterosaurs stayed with their young until they reached adulthood, if only to offer them protection and guide them to food.
Like many dinosaurs (though not as much), pterosaurs in the media slip into Real Is Brown territory. In reality, we can be relatively confident that living pterosaurs would have been brightly and flamboyantly colored. Like most other reptiles, pterosaurs would have had excellent eyesight and been capable of seeing colors, and the ones with crests likely used them as visual signals to communicate with other pterosaurs. This is further supported with findings in 2017, when an unnamed tapejarid was discovered with fossilized melanosomes (pigment cells). Based on the types of melanin found in its fossil, its fur would have been black and its crest would have been red.
There's a pervasive misconception that pterosaurs went extinct or at least declined significantly due to competition with birds (this is more often found in older works, but still pops up every now and again). Historically, this notion has been based on the perception that pterosaurs appeared to have gone into decline around the same time birds diversified in the fossil record, but newer research suggests this phenomenon was far less dramatic than initially thought and probably had nothing to do with avialan radiation. In fact at least one group of pterosaurs, the stork-like azhdarchids, were still doing just fine right up to the K-Pg boundary and were continuing to evolve and diversify at a healthy rate straight to the end of the Maastrichtian. Possible Maastrichtian remains of nyctosaurids, tapejarids, and pteranodontids may even suggest that a decline in pterosaur diversity never actually happened at all, simply being an artifact of preservation bias. There's even a few evidenced cases of pterosaurs taking back niches which had previously been occupied by birds. Much like their non-avian dinosaur cousins, it's not unreasonable to speculate that pterosaurs would still be around today if not for a certain asteroid.
This used to be on Ptero Soarer (now Terror-dactyl), but it was removed. I'm adding it here in case we can salvage some of the paragraphs.