Leptosuchomorpha is a
clade
In biology, a clade (), also known as a Monophyly, monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that is composed of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Clades are the fundamental unit of cladistics, a modern approach t ...
of
phytosaur
Phytosaurs (Φυτόσαυροι in Greek, meaning 'plant lizard') are an extinct group of large, mostly semiaquatic Late Triassic archosauriform or basal archosaurian reptiles. Phytosaurs belong to the order Phytosauria and are sometimes ref ...
s. It is a
node-based taxon
Phylogenetic nomenclature is a method of nomenclature for taxon, taxa in biology that uses phylogenetics, phylogenetic definitions for taxon names as explained below. This contrasts with Biological classification, the traditional method, by which ...
defined by Michelle R. Stocker in 2010 as the last common ancestor of ''
Leptosuchus studeri'' and ''
Pseudopalatus pristinus'' and all of its descendants.
A new definition was proposed by Andrew S. Jones and Richard J. Butler in 2018 as the last common ancestor and all descendants of ''
Smilosuchus lithodendrorum'', ''
Leptosuchus studeri'', and ''
Machaeroprosopus pristinus'' to reflect the new interrelationships of Phytosauria they recovered.
Phylogeny
Below is a
cladogram
A cladogram (from Greek language, Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an Phylogenetic tree, evolutionary tree because it does not s ...
from Stocker (2012)
[
]
References
Phytosauria
Late Triassic reptiles of Europe
Late Triassic reptiles of North America
Late Triassic first appearances
Late Triassic extinctions
Taxa named by Michelle R. Stocker
{{paleo-reptile-stub