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Sunday, 13 March 2016
An exceptional fossil skull from South America and the origins of the archosauriform radiation
Birds, dinosaurs, crocodilians, pterosaurs and their close relatives
form the highly diverse clade Archosauriformes. Archosauriforms have a
deep evolutionary history, originating in the late Permian, prior to the
end-Permian mass extinction, and radiating in the Triassic to dominate
Mesozoic ecosystems. However, the origins of this clade and its
extraordinarily successful body plan remain obscure. Here, we describe
an exceptionally preserved fossil skull from the Lower Triassic of
Brazil, representing a new species, Teyujagua paradoxa, transitional in morphology between archosauriforms and more primitive reptiles. This
skull reveals for the first time the mosaic assembly of key features of
the archosauriform skull, including the antorbital and mandibular
fenestrae, serrated teeth, and closed lower temporal bar. Phylogenetic
analysis recovers Teyujagua as the sister taxon to Archosauriformes, and is congruent with a two-phase model of early archosauriform evolution, in=read more =http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22817
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