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However, phylogenetic analyses performed in the 21st century place Euparkeriidae as a group of Archosauriformes, a position outside Pseudosuchia and close to the ancestry of both crocodile-line archosaurs and bird-line archosaurs (which include dinosaurs and pterosaurs). However, they are probably not direct ancestors of archosaurs.
Of these, only phytosaurs and aetosaurs constitute monophyletic groups, and the term Pseudosuchia was simply a catch-all term for any species that didn't fit in one of the other three sub-orders. Pseudosuchia as used in recent literature is a stem-based taxon that includes crocodile -line archosaurs , or all archosaurs (including crocodilians ...
The term "thecodont", now considered an obsolete term, was first used by the English paleontologist Richard Owen in 1859 to describe Triassic archosaurs, and it became widely used in the 20th century. Thecodonts were considered the "basal stock" from which the more advanced archosaurs descended.
Roland Sookias, a paleontologist responsible for many studies on euparkeriids in the 2010s, also considers them to be closer archosaur relatives than the proterochampsians. [2] [8] Like Nesbitt (2011), he found phytosaurs to be the closest relatives of Archosauria, followed by the Euparkeria-like reptile Dorosuchus, and then by the euparkeriids ...
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.
Arganasuchus is universally considered a "rauisuchian", a grouping of large carnivorous pseudosuchians (crocodile-line archosaurs) from the Triassic. However, "Rauisuchia" is currently considered to be a paraphyletic grade of archosaurs incrementally closer to crocodilians , rather than a clade (a natural grouping defined by shared relations).
"Rauisuchia" is a paraphyletic group of mostly large and carnivorous Triassic archosaurs. [2] Rauisuchians are a category of archosaurs within a larger group called Pseudosuchia, which encompasses all archosaurs more closely related to crocodilians than to birds and other dinosaurs. First named in the 1940s, Rauisuchia was a name exclusive to ...
This left crocodilians and birds as the two surviving archosaur groups. [56] A series of phylogenetic analyses in the late 1980s and 1990s strongly supported the proposal of Gow (1975). [54] [57] [53] [58] [59] Tanystropheus, Macrocnemus, Protorosaurus, and Prolacerta were always placed as members of Archosauromorpha, closer to archosaurs than ...