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The older morphological definition of Archosauria nowadays roughly corresponds to Archosauriformes, a group named to encompass crown-group archosaurs and their close relatives. [ 4 ] The oldest true archosaur fossils are known from the Early Triassic period, though the first archosauriforms and archosauromorphs (reptilians closer to archosaurs ...
The "classic" definition of archosaur utilized prior to the widespread use of cladistics is now roughly equivalent to the clade Archosauriformes. [5] Archosaurus is still considered the oldest undisputed archosauriform, as well as one of the few valid members of the family Proterosuchidae. [6]
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]
Euparkeriidae is an extinct family of small carnivorous archosauriforms which lived from the Early Triassic to the Middle Triassic ().While most other early archosauriforms walked on four limbs, euparkeriids were probably facultative bipeds that had the ability to walk on their hind limbs at times.
The name Pseudosuchia was originally given to a group of superficially crocodile-like prehistoric reptiles from the Triassic period, but fell out of use in the late 20th century, especially after the name Crurotarsi was established in 1990 to label the clade (evolutionary grouping) of archosaurs encompassing most reptiles previously identified as pseudosuchians.
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.
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 ...
The redefinition to cover the last common ancestor of archosaurs and lepidosaurs was the result of papers by Jacques A. Gauthier and colleagues in the 1980s. [ 6 ] Genomic studies [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] and comprehensive studies in the fossil record [ 10 ] suggest that turtles are closely related to archosaurs as part of Sauria, and not to the non ...