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Some archosaurs, such as birds, are secondarily toothless. Antorbital fenestrae reduced the weight of the skull, which was relatively large in early archosaurs, rather like that of modern crocodilians. Mandibular fenestrae may also have reduced the weight of the jaw in some forms.
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 ...
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.
Other features of Smok seem to exclude it from these groups of archosaurs. The premaxilla and maxilla of the upper jaw attach closely to each other, making a continuous row of evenly spaced teeth. Early theropods and orthithosuchids have a toothless gap between the premaxilla and the maxilla, distinguishing them from Smok.
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 ...
A 68-million-year-old skull fossil found in Antarctica has revealed the oldest known modern bird, which was likely related to the waterfowl that live by lakes and oceans today, according to new ...
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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]