Faux Theropods

The skeleton of Effigia

Bit of a shorter post this month, as I'm prepping a photo-heavy review of the Creative Beast raptor toys that I just received. This month I’ve decided to tackle one of my absolute favorite groups of Triassic weirdos: shuvosaurids! They are a fairly obscure clade outside of paleo circles, consisting of only three (used to be four) named genera but shuvosaurids should be poster children for the concept of convergent evolution. These things are pseudosuchian theropod mimics, and not just theropods but ornithomimosaurs. Ostrich dinosaurs in the Triassic...but suchians!

Adorable Triassic Pseudosuchians

Erpetosuchus sp. from North America

Erpetosuchids are one of those groups that I saw reference to somewhere, filed it away in the recesses of my brain, and didn’t remember again until I read the new paper by Nesbitt et al. (2018) about the brain and endocast of Parringtonia gracilis. There’s a gorgeous skeletal restoration on page 124 and that skull looked awfully familiar to me. Oh yes, it looks a whole lot like the skull of Erpetosuchus grandi, a taxon I first read about thanks to Benton & Walker (2002) probably a decade ago. With a little more digging, I found that the Erpetosuchidae is a small but charismatic family of mid-sized pseudosuchians with unusual dentition and surprisingly croc-like armor. This is one of those small, obscure groups of Triassic hellasaurs that I like to put in the spotlight, if even briefly.