Paleosuchus

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Paleosuchus
Temporal range: Late Pleistocene - Recent, 0.1–0 Ma[1]
Paleosuchus palpebrosus
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Clade: Archosauromorpha
Clade: Archosauriformes
Order: Crocodilia
Family: Alligatoridae
Subfamily: Caimaninae
Genus: Paleosuchus
Gray, 1862
Species

Paleosuchus is a South American genus of reptiles in the subfamily Caimaninae of the family Alligatoridae. They are the smallest members of the order Crocodilia in the Americas.[2] The genus contains two extant species[3] and a yet unnamed fossil species.[4]

Image Scientific name Common name Distribution
P. palpebrosus Cuvier's dwarf caiman Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad, and Venezuela
P. trigonatus Smooth-fronted caiman Amazon and Orinoco Basins

References[edit]

  1. ^ Rio, Jonathan P.; Mannion, Philip D. (6 September 2021). "Phylogenetic analysis of a new morphological dataset elucidates the evolutionary history of Crocodylia and resolves the long-standing gharial problem". PeerJ. 9: e12094. doi:10.7717/peerj.12094. PMC 8428266. PMID 34567843.
  2. ^ Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey (2014). The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed at http://animaldiversity.org.
  3. ^ Alderton, D. (1991). Crocodiles and Alligators of the World. New York: Facts on File Publications.
  4. ^ Salas-Gismondi, Rodolfo; Flynn, John J.; Baby, Patrice; Tejada-Lara, Julia V.; Wesselingh, Frank P.; Antoine, Pierre-Olivier (2015-04-07). "A Miocene hyperdiverse crocodylian community reveals peculiar trophic dynamics in proto-Amazonian mega-wetlands". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 282 (1804): 20142490. doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2490. PMC 4375856. PMID 25716785.

External links[edit]

Media related to Paleosuchus at Wikimedia Commons