Paleosuchus
Temporal range: Late Pleistocene - Recent, 0.1–0 Ma[1]
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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

  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

Wikispecies has information related to Paleosuchus.

Media related to Paleosuchus at Wikimedia Commons


Extant Crocodilian species
Related articles on alligators, caimans, crocodiles and gharials
Taxon identifiers
Authority control databases: National
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