Prosauropods - Classification

Classification

Sauropodomorpha is one of the two major clades within the order Saurischia. The sauropodomorphs' sister group, the Theropoda, includes bipedal carnivores like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus; as well as birds. However, sauropodomorphs also share a number of characteristics with the Ornithischia, so a small minority of palaeontologists, like Bakker, have historically placed both sets of herbivores within a group called "Phytodinosauria" or "Ornithischiformes."

In Linnaean taxonomy, Sauropodomorpha (which means "lizard feet forms") is either a suborder or is left unranked. It was originally established by Friedrich von Huene in 1932, who broke it into two groups: the basal forms within Prosauropoda, and their descendants, the giant Sauropoda.

Recent phylogenetic analyses by Adam Yates (2004, 2006) and others firmly places Sauropoda within a paraphyletic "Prosauropoda". Also, finds of late Triassic sauropods demonstrate that there is no gap between the "prosauropod" and sauropod lineages. Recent cladistic analyses suggest that the clade Prosauropoda, which was named by Huene in 1920 and was defined by Sereno, in 1998, as all animals more closely related to Plateosaurus engelhardti than to Saltasaurus loricatus, is a junior synonym of Plateosauridae as both contain the same taxa.

Evidence against sauropod ancestry within Prosauropoda comes from the fact that prosauropods had a smaller outer toe on their hind feet than the sauropods. Many maintain that it is easier for digits to be reduced or lost during evolution than the reverse, however there is no evidence for this. The lengthening, or gaining of extra digits is common in marine reptiles, and within the theropods digit lengthening occurred at least once. Therefore, using this as evidence against ancestral prosauropods is questionable.

Most modern classification schemes break the prosauropods into a half-dozen groups that evolved separately from one common lineage. While they have a number of shared characteristics, the evolutionary requirements for giraffe-like browsing high in the trees may have caused convergent evolution, where similar traits evolve separately because they faced the same evolutionary pressure, instead of (homologous) traits derived from a shared ancestor.