Alligatoroidea

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alligatoroidea
Temporal range:
Ma
caimans are living members of the superfamily
Alligatoroidea.
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Clade: Archosauromorpha
Clade: Archosauriformes
Order: Crocodilia
Superfamily: Alligatoroidea
Gray, 1844
Subgroups

Alligatoroidea is one of three

extinct
members more closely related to the alligators than the two other groups.

Evolution

An alligator nest at Everglades National Park, Florida, United States
A. olseni fore limb
Alligator prenasalis fossil

The superfamily Alligatoroidea is thought to have split from the crocodile-gharial lineage in the

mitochondrial genome was sequenced in the 1990s.[5] The full genome, published in 2014, suggests that the alligator evolved much more slowly than mammals and birds.[6]

Phylogeny

gavialids. When considering only living taxa (neontology), this makes Alligatoroidea and Alligatoridae synonymous, and only Alligatoridae is used. Thus, Alligatoroidea is only used in the context of paleontology
.

Traditionally, crocodiles and alligators were considered more closely related and grouped together in the clade Brevirostres, to the exclusion of the gharials. This classification was based on morphological studies primarily focused on analyzing skeletal traits of living and extinct fossil species.[10] However, recent molecular studies using DNA sequencing have rejected Brevirostres upon finding the crocodiles and gavialids to be more closely related than the alligators.[11][12][13][9][14] The new clade Longirostres was named by Harshman et al. in 2003.[11]

A 2018

stratigraphic (fossil age) data established the inter-relationships within Crocodilia,[9] which was expanded upon in 2021 by Hekkala et al. using paleogenomics by extracting DNA from the extinct Voay.[14]

The below cladogram shows the results of the latest study:

Crocodylia
Alligatoroidea
(
stem-based group
)

extinct basal Crocodilians† (including Mekosuchinae†)

Longirostres
Crocodyloidea

extinct basal crocodiles†

Crocodylidae
(crown group)
(
stem-based group
)
Gavialoidea

extinct basal Gavialoids†

Gavialidae
(crown group)
(
stem-based group
)
(crown group)
(crown group)

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 7254442
    .
  2. ^
    doi:10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa074
    .
  3. PMID 34567843
    .
  4. JSTOR 3889340
    .
  5. PMID 9402737
    .
  6. PMID 25504731
    .
  7. doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.31.100901.141308
    .
  8. PMID 31720094
    .
  9. ^
    PMID 30051855
    .
  10. PMID 22303441
    .
  11. ^
    PMID 12775527
    .
  12. PMID 18372192
    .
  13. PMID 22431965
    .
  14. ^
    PMID 33907305
    .
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