Eopterosauria is a proposed clade of basal pterosaurs from the Triassic. 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".[1] The specimen BSP 1994, previously assigned to Eudimorphodon, was named the separate taxon Austriadraco in 2015, and assigned to the new family Austriadraconidae, but further classification was not described.[2] The following phylogenetic analysis follows the topology of Andres et al. (2014).[1]
| Eopterosauria Temporal range: Triassic,
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|---|---|
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| Preondactylus skeletal restoration | |
Scientific classification 
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| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Order: | †Pterosauria |
| Clade: | †Eopterosauria Andres et al., 2014 |
| Subgroups | |
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| Eopterosauria | |
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.[3] The analyses presented by Baron (2020) supported previous hypotheses presented in research that had been published in the previous two years.[4][5]
References
edit- ^ a b Andres, B.B.; Clark, J.; Xu, X. (2014). "The Earliest Pterodactyloid and the Origin of the Group". Current Biology. 24 (9): 1011–6. Bibcode:2014CBio...24.1011A. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.03.030. PMID 24768054.
- ^ Kellner, A.W.A. (2015). "Comments on Triassic pterosaurs with discussion about ontogeny and description of new taxa". Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências. 87 (2): 669–689. doi:10.1590/0001-3765201520150307. PMID 26131631.
- ^ Matthew G. Baron (2020). "Testing pterosaur ingroup relationships through broader sampling of avemetatarsalian taxa and characters and a range of phylogenetic analysis techniques". PeerJ. 8: e9604. doi:10.7717/peerj.9604. PMC 7512134. PMID 33005485.
- ^ Dalla Vecchia, Fabio Marco (25 July 2019). "Seazzadactylus venieri gen. et sp. nov., a new pterosaur (Diapsida: Pterosauria) from the Upper Triassic (Norian) of northeastern Italy". PeerJ. 7: e7363. doi:10.7717/peerj.7363. PMC 6661147. PMID 31380153.
- ^ 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. PMID 30104753.