Pseudosuchia: An Overview Of The Prehistoric Relatives Of Crocodilians

Pseudosuchia is the clade consisting of crocodilians and all the extinct reptiles more closely related to them than to any living species. Beneath this formal definition lays a once dynamic and diverse group reptiles that were far more than simply minor variations of today’s crocodilians. Pseudosuchia is one of the two branches of the clade Archosauria, the ruling reptiles. This is the same clade that contained the dinosaurs, and pseudosuchians possessed many of the same traits that made their more famous cousins so successful. Indeed, during the Triassic Period, it was not dinosaurs but the pseudosuchians who were the dominant megafauna. Afterwards, they remained the most persistent competitors of the dinosaurs. Pseudosuchia included small, pug-nosed plant-eaters, large tank-like species, species which became fully aquatic, as well as the largest terrestrial predators to terrorize the Earth after the demise of the dinosaurs. Even the semi-aquatic crocodile-like species were highly diverse, includi