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Archosaurus (meaning "ruling lizard") is an extinct genus of carnivorous proterosuchid archosauriform reptile. [1] Its fossils are dated to the latest Permian of Russia and Poland , it is one of the earliest known archosauriforms.
Historically there has been uncertainty as to why natural selection favored the development of these features, which are very important for active warm-blooded creatures, but of little apparent use to cold-blooded aquatic ambush predators that spend the vast majority of their time floating in water or lying on river banks.
Archosauriformes (Greek for 'ruling lizards', and Latin for 'form') is a clade of diapsid reptiles encompassing archosaurs and some of their close relatives. It was defined by Jacques Gauthier (1994) as the clade stemming from the last common ancestor of Proterosuchidae and Archosauria. [3]
The Crocodylomorpha comprise a variety of forms, shapes, and sizes, which occupied a range of habitats. As with most amniotes, Crocodylomorphs were and are oviparous, laying eggs in a nest or mound, known from strata as old as the Late Jurassic. [15]
Among mammals, the monotremes are oviparous. Ovo-viviparity: or oviparity with retention of zygotes in either the female's or in the male's body, but there are no trophic interactions between zygote and parents. [1] This mode is found in the slowworm, Anguis fragilis. In the sea horse, zygotes are retained in the male's ventral "marsupium".
Oviparous animals are animals that reproduce by depositing fertilized zygotes outside the body (known as laying or spawning) in metabolically independent incubation organs known as eggs, which nurture the embryo into moving offsprings known as hatchlings with little or no embryonic development within the mother.
Proterosuchus fergusi from the Early Triassic of South Africa. They were slender, medium-sized (about 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) long, largest specimens reached 3.5–4 m (11–13 ft) [2]), long-snouted and superficially crocodile-like animals, although they lacked the armoured scutes of true crocodiles, and their skeletal features are much more primitive.
Extinct archosaurs include non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and extinct relatives of crocodilians. Modern paleontologists define Archosauria as a crown group that includes the most recent common ancestor of living birds and crocodilians, and all of its descendants.