The only known specimen of this pterosaur was collected from a private limestone quarry near the town of Hjoula, Lebanon, more than fifteen years before its 2019 scientific description.

The locality is considered a Lagerstätte, a place with fossils of exceptional preservation, and belongs to the Sannine Formation, which dates to the late Cenomanian age of the Cretaceous period.

Lebanese Cretaceous deposits have been known for well-preserved fish and invertebrates since the Middle Ages, but fossils of tetrapod (ancestrally four-limbed) animals are very rare.

[1][2][3][4][5] The very fragile but well-preserved pterosaur specimen was split in two pieces when discovered on the limestone slab, and apart from a fracture caused by the pickaxe of a quarry worker, its skull was intact, as were the wings, legs, and body.

The owner of the quarry allowed a team of researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada to prepare and describe the specimen, while intending for the fossil to be eventually sold, which is legal in Lebanon.

[1][2][3] The Canadian palaeontologists Michael W. Caldwell and Philip J. Currie teamed up with an international group of researchers to scientifically describe the specimen, including the Brazilians Alexander W. A. Kellner, Borja Holgado, and Juliana M. Sayão, Italian Fabio M. Dalla Vecchia, and Lebanese Roy Nohra (Kellner and Dalla Vecchia had previously done fieldwork in Lebanon together).

[1][2][3][6] The holotype specimen (on which the scientific name is based) is catalogued as MIM F1, and casts are present at the University of Alberta and the National Museum of Brazil.

[1][6] The previous most completely known pterosaur specimens from the continent were also from Lebanon: a partial forelimb of an unnamed ornithocheiroid (catalogued as MSNM V 3881) from the Hakel Lagerstätte of the same age, and Microtuban, an azhdarchoid consisting mainly of the wings and shoulder girdle, also from Hjoula.

[1] The specimen has become the centrepiece of the fossil vertebrate collection at the MIM Museum, where it is nicknamed "Mimo" and is exhibited alongside a hologram, a movie, a life-sized reconstruction, and a game.

Mimodactylus does not have the lancet-shaped teeth with sideways compressed crowns which are characteristic of istiodactylids, though, and also lacks the sharp carinae (cutting edges) seen in Istiodactylus.

[1] The dentition of Mimodactylus is similar to that of more basal (or "primitive") archaeopterodactyloid pterosaurs such as Pterodactylus and Germanodactylus, and the only other derived (or "advanced") pterodactyloid with comparable teeth is Haopterus.

The deltopectoral crest of the humerus (ridge for attachment of the deltoid and pectoral muscles) is distinctive (an autapomorphy) in being rectangular, and has an unusual, straight, lower edge.

[1] The pteroid bone (a hand-bone unique to pterosaurs which supported the front wing-membrane or propatagium) of Mimodactylus is rather large, and longer than the humerus at 53 mm (2.1 in).

[1] In their 2019 phylogenetic analysis, Kellner and colleagues found Mimodactylus to be most closely related to Haopterus (a genus from China previously classified in several groups).

They noted that Mimodactylus is the first istiodactyliform known from Gondwana (the southern supercontinent which included Africa and Arabia), members of the group previously being only known from Early Cretaceous sites in Europe and Asia.

[12] The Chinese paleontologist Yizhi Xu and colleagues found Mimodactylus to be the sister taxon of Linlongopterus in 2022, with Haopterus at the base of their clade.

Suggestions have been made for the derived groups based on their dentition, such as piscivory, frugivory, durophagy, insectivory, and in the case of the related Istiodactylus, scavenging.

The ability to manoeuvre during flight appears to have been limited in Mimodactylus as in open-sea fliers, and it was probably highly stable when flying, like albatrosses and some other birds.

Kellner and colleagues therefore suggested that instead of being insectivorous, Mimodactylus and its relatives may have foraged for decapod crustaceans from water surfaces, similar to how some albatrosses feed on shrimp.

[1] The broad rostrum and widely spaced, relatively robust, and pointed teeth of Mimodactylus would have been helpful for seizing shrimp in the water.

Decapod crustaceans are the most common invertebrate fossils found at Hjoula, and fish and zooplankton could also have provided food for pterosaurs in the area.

[1] The first two fossil dragonfly species from Lebanon (including Libanoliupanshania mimi, also named for the MIM Museum) and a beetle were reported by the Lebanese palaeontologist Dany Azar and colleagues in 2019, showing that Hjoula does have potential for preserving insects.

These researchers stated that although the Hjoula outcrop represents a marine environment, fossils of terrestrial organisms (including the then newly discovered insects and pterosaurs) indicate they were deposited close to a shoreline during the early late Cenomanian.

Lebanon was mostly submerged on a large, shallow carbonate platform during the middle Cenomanian, which bordered the northeastern part of the Afro-Arabian continent with the Neotethys ocean, but some small islands were exposed.