Classification
Poposaurus is a member of the family Poposauridae, part of the larger pseudosuchian group Poposauroidea. It is closely related to other Triassic pseudosuchians like ctenosauriscids and shuvosaurids. Like Poposaurus, shuvosaurids were bipedal. When the specimen YPM VP 057100 was described by Gauthier et al. in 2011, Poposaurus was included in a phylogenetic analysis. Poposaurus was placed within Poposauroidea as the sister taxon to the large-bodied herbivorous Lotosaurus and the shuvosaurids. This means that Poposaurus is more closely related to Lotosaurus and shuvosaurids than it is to any other pseudosuchian. The analysis found ctenosauriscids and the aquatic Qianosuchus to be successively more basal poposauroids. Below is the cladogram from Gauthier et al. (2011):
| Archosauria |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Read more about this topic: Poposaurus