'' In 2006,
Lü Junchang and colleagues named the clade Boreopteridae for the clade containing the common ancestor of
Boreopterus and
Feilongus and all its descendants, which the authors reclassified as close relatives of the
ornithocheirids. (
Feilongus had originally been considered a
gallodactylid). Many possible boreopterids were subsequently described, Originally considered close relatives of the ornithocheirids, many of these supposed boreopterids have been found to belong to other groups of the pterodactyloid lineage. In 2012, a phylogenetic analysis by Lü
et al. divided the Boreopteridae into two subfamilies: Boreopterinae, comprising
Boreopterus and
Zhenyuanopterus, and Moganopterinae, comprising
Feilongus and
Moganopterus. However, in 2013, Andres & Myers found both
Boreopterus and
Feilongus to be closely related to
Cycnorhamphus, making them members of the Gallodactylidae as had been originally thought when
Feilongus was discovered. A subsequent analysis including the other supposed boreopterids found that
Boreopterus itself, and therefore the name Boreopteridae, was indeed a member of the
ornithocheiroid clade, but that
Feilongus was in fact a
ctenochasmatoid closely related to
Gnathosaurus. and was then found to contain just
Boreopterus and
Zhenyuanopterus by Wu and colleagues in 2017, a subsequently followed classification by recent studies.
Phylogeny The Boreopteridae was included in an analysis by Brian Andres and colleagues in 2014, where it was placed in a basal position within the Anhangueria.
Topology 1: Andres
et al. (2014). |2= }} }}
Topology 2: Longrich
et al. (2018). |label2=
Lanceodontia |2= |2=
Anhangueria }} }} }} }} }} ==Paleoecology==