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Euparkeria is close to the ancestry of Archosauria, the reptile group that includes crocodilians, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs (including birds). Fossils of Euparkeria , including nearly complete skeletons, have been recovered from the Cynognathus Assemblage Zone (CAZ, also known as the Burgersdorp Formation ), which hosts the oldest advanced ...
Archosaurs quickly diversified in the aftermath of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (~252 Ma), which wiped out most of the then-dominant therapsid competitors such as the gorgonopsians and anomodonts, and the subsequent arid Triassic climate allowed the more drought-resilient archosaurs (largely due to their uric acid-based urinary system ...
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]
Traditionally, the order Thecodontia Owen, 1859 was divided into four suborders, the Proterosuchia (early primitive forms, another paraphyletic assemblage), Phytosauria (large crocodile-like semi-aquatic animals), the Aetosauria (armoured herbivores), and the Pseudosuchia, a wastebasket taxon intended to be paraphyletic to all later archosaurs (see e.g., Alfred Sherwood Romer's Vertebrate ...
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.
As a typical archosaur, Batrachotomus had two antorbital fenestrae between the orbits and nostrils, and a fifth pair of small openings at the rear part of the lower jaw. The jaws contained sharp teeth which were compressed laterally and unequal in size and shape, [7] [9] and this variation of tooth shape is known as heterodonty.
Asilisaurus was a lightly built animal with a fairly long neck (by early archosaur standards), a short snout tipped with a beak, and slender limbs. It probably walked on all four legs based on the length of its limbs.
Life restoration of Revueltosaurus callenderi, a pseudosuchian that may be close to the ancestry of aetosaurs. Although aetosaurs are known exclusively from the Late Triassic, their currently accepted position in archosaur phylogeny indicates that they originated from more basal pseudosuchian archosaurs in the Early or Middle Triassic.