Orientalosuchina Explained

Orientalosuchina is an extinct clade of alligatoroid crocodylians from South and East Asia that lived during the Paleocene and Eocene.

The clade was named as the result of a 2019 study by Massonne et al. that included several extinct alligatoroid taxa from Asia and found that they were all closely related and together formed a monophyletic clade as basal members of Alligatoroidea, as shown in the cladogram below:^[1]

Some studies have disputed this placement of Jiangxisuchus within Orientalosuchina as an alligatoroid, instead recovering Jiangxisuchus as a basal member of Crocodyloidea.^{[2] [3]}

Notes and References

1. Tobias Massonne . Davit Vasilyan . Márton Rabi . Madelaine Böhme . 2019 . A new alligatoroid from the Eocene of Vietnam highlights an extinct Asian clade independent from extant Alligator sinensis . PeerJ . 7 . e7562 . 10.7717/peerj.7562 . 31720094 . 6839522 . free .
2. Li . C. . Wu . X. C. . Rufolo . S. J. . 2019 . A new crocodyloid (Eusuchia: Crocodylia) from the upper cretaceous of China . . 94 . 25–39 . 10.1016/j.cretres.2018.09.015 . 133661294 .
3. 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 . . 9 . e12094 . 34567843. 10.7717/peerj.12094. 8428266 . free.