page_title: Poposauroidea
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Poposauroidea / History
caption_attribution_description: Qianosuchus mixtus, an archosaur from the Middle Triassic of China, after skeletal reconstruction by Matt Celeskey, pencil drawing
context_page_description: Poposauroidea is a clade of advanced pseudosuchians. It includes poposaurids, shuvosaurids, ctenosauriscids, and other unusual pseudosuchians such as Qianosuchus and Lotosaurus. However, it excludes most large predatory quadrupedal "rauisuchians" such as rauisuchids and "prestosuchids". Those reptiles are now allied with crocodylomorphs in a clade known as Loricata, which is the sister taxon to the poposauroids in the clade Paracrocodylomorpha. Although it was first formally defined in 2007, the name "Poposauroidea" has been used for many years. The group has been referred to as Poposauridae by some authors, although this name is often used more narrowly to refer to the family that includes Poposaurus and its close relatives.
  Poposauroids went extinct at the end of the Triassic period along with other non-crocodylomorph pseudosuchians. However, they were among the most diverse and long-lasting members of non-crocodylomorph Pseudosuchia, with Xilousuchus living near the very beginning of the Triassic and Effigia surviving up until near the end of the Triassic.
context_section_description: Franz Nopcsa first used the term Poposauridae in 1923 to refer to poposauroids. At this time, the sole member of the group was Poposaurus, which was considered to be a theropod dinosaur. Over the following years, poposauroids were placed in various groups, including Saurischia, Theropoda, and Carnosauria. This classification existed up until the 1970s, when better remains indicated that Poposaurus was a pseudosuchian rather than a dinosaur. Other genera such as Sillosuchus and Shuvosaurus were later erected. Like Poposaurus, Shuvosaurus was originally thought to be a theropod dinosaur.
  Sankar Chatterjee reclassified poposauroids as theropod dinosaurs with his description of the new genus Postosuchus in 1985. Chatterjee even considered poposauroids to be the ancestors of tyrannosaurs. Postosuchus was widely considered to be a poposauroid for the next ten years and was included in many phylogenetic analyses of Triassic archosaurs. In 1995, Robert Long and Phillip A Murry noted that several specimens referred to Postosuchus were distinct from the holotype, and so they assigned those specimens to the new genera Lythrosuchus and Chatterjeea.
  In 2005, Sterling Nesbitt noted that "ctenosauriscids" such as Arizonasaurus, Bromsgroveia, and Lotosaurus shared many similarities with "poposaurids" such as Poposaurus, Sillosuchus, and "Chatterjeea" (now known as Shuvosaurus). He proposed that they formed a clade (informally named "Group X") to the exception of other pseudosuchians.
  "Group X" was formally given the name "Poposauroidea" by Jonathan C. Weinbaum and Axel Hungerbühler in 2007. In their paper, Weinbaum and Hungerbühler described two new skeletons of Poposaurus and incorporated several new characters of the genus into a phylogenetic analysis. Poposauroidea was recovered as a monophyletic grouping, while other rauisuchians (namely Rauisuchidae and Prestosuchidae) were placed as basal forms of a new group called Paracrocodyliformes.
  Brusatte et al. (2010) conducted a phylogenetic study of archosaurs that resulted in a grouping referred to as Poposauroidea. Unlike many recent studies, they found Rauisuchia to be monophyletic, consisting of two major clades: Rauisuchoidea and Poposauroidea. However, the monophyly of Rauisuchia was not strongly supported in Brusatte et al.'s analysis. They noted that if their tree was enlarged by one step, Poposauroidea fell outside Rauisuchia to become the sister group of Ornithosuchidae, which is thought to closely related to, but outside, Rauisuchia. In their tree, Poposauroidea included genera usually classified as poposauroids as well as several other genera that were not previously placed in the group. One of these genera, Qianosuchus, is unique among pseudosuchians in its semiaquatic lifestyle.
  In his massive revision of archosaurs which included a large cladistic analysis, Sterling J. Nesbitt (2011) found Xilousuchus to be a poposauroid most closely related to Arizonasaurus. Nesbitt's analysis did not recover a monophyletic Rauisuchia or monophyletic Rauisuchoidea. Poposauroidea was found to be monophyletic, and more resolved than in previous analyses, with Qianosuchus as the most basal member of the group and Lotosaurus grouping with shuvosaurids instead of ctenosauriscids. The cladogram below follows Nesbitt (2011) with clade names based on previous studies.
caption: Qianosuchus mixtus, an unusual semiaquatic archosaur that was placed as the most basal poposauroid in Nesbitt's phylogenetic analysis.
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