Eopterosauria is a proposed

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 basal

pterosaur Pterosaurs are an extinct clade of flying reptiles in the order Pterosauria. They existed during most of the Mesozoic: from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 million to 66 million years ago). Pterosaurs are the earli ...

s from the

Triassic The Triassic ( ; sometimes symbolized 🝈) is a geologic period and system which spans 50.5 million years from the end of the Permian Period 251.902 million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Jurassic Period 201.4 Mya. The Triassic is t ...

. The term was first used in Andres ''et al.'' (2014) to include '' Preondactylus'', '' Austriadactylus'', '' Peteinosaurus'' and Eudimorphodontidae. Inside the group were two other new clades, Preondactylia, which included ''Preondactylus'' and ''Austriadactylus'', and Eudimorphodontoidea, to include Eudimorphodontidae and Raeticodactylidae. Eopterosauria was defined as "the least inclusive clade containing ''Preondactylus buffarinii'' and ''Eudimorphodon ranzii''". The specimen BSP 1994, previously assigned to ''

Eudimorphodon ''Eudimorphodon'' is an extinct genus of pterosaur that was discovered in 1973 by Mario Pandolfi in the town of Cene, Lombardy, Cene, Italy and described the same year by Rocco Zambelli. The nearly complete skeleton was retrieved from shale depos ...

'', was named the separate taxon '' Austriadraco'' in 2015, and assigned to the new family Austriadraconidae, but further classification was not described. The following phylogenetic analysis follows the topology of Andres ''et al.'' (2014). In a 2020 study of early pterosaur interrelationships carried out by Matthew G. Baron, no evidence was found to support the existence of Eopterosauria as an early diverging clade within Pterosauria. Instead, the results of this later analyses suggested that most pterosaurs fall into either Caviramidae or Zambellisauria, with only a small number of taxa falling in a more 'basal' position. The analyses presented by Baron (2020) supported previous hypotheses presented in research that had been published in the previous two years.Britt, B. B.; Dalla Vecchia, F. M.; Chure, D. J.; Engelmann, G. F.; Whiting, M. F.; Scheetz, R. D. (2018). "Caelestiventus hanseni gen. et sp. nov. extends the desert-dwelling pterosaur record back 65 million years". Nature Ecology & Evolution. 2 (9): 1386–1392. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0627-y. ISSN 2397-334X. .

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q18061161 Pterosaurs Late Triassic life