Actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes) successfully passed through four of the big five mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, but the effects of these crises on the group are poorly understood. Many researchers have assumed that the Permo-Triassic mass extinction (PTME) and end-Triassic extinction (ETE) had little impact on actinopterygians, despite devastating many other groups. Here, two m...

The upper Triassic deposits of the Selous Basin in south Tanzania have not been prospected for fossil tetrapods since the middle of last century, when Gordon M. Stockley collected two rhynchosaur bone fragments from the so called "Tunduru beds". Here we present the results of a field trip conducted in July 2015 to the vicinities of Tunduru and Msamara, Ruvuma Region, Tanzania, in search for sim...

The end-Permian mass extinction, 251 million years (Myr) ago, was the most devastating ecological event of all time, and it was exacerbated by two earlier events at the beginning and end of the Guadalupian, 270 and 260 Myr ago. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover. Disaster taxa, such as Lystrosaurus, insinuated themsel...

Ornithischian dinosaurs are one of the most taxonomically diverse dinosaur clades during the Mesozoic, yet their origin and early diversification remain virtually unknown. In recent years, several new Triassic ornithischian taxa have been proposed, mostly based upon isolated teeth. New discoveries of skeletal material of some of these tooth taxa indicate that these teeth can no longer be assign...

Detrital zircon populations of the South Qiangtang terrane (SQT) provide vital information for reconstructing Tethyan evolution Tibetan Plateau but are obscured by undefined affiliation detrital samples and superimposition multiple tectonothermal events. We outlined SQT based on geological mapping collated Cambrian-Triassic to investigate representative populations. Although diachronous strata ...

Aetosaurians are some of the most common fossils collected from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of Arizona, especially at the Petrified Forest National Park (PEFO). Aetosaurians collected from lower levels of the park include Desmatosuchus spurensis, Paratypothorax, Adamanasuchus eisenhardtae, Calyptosuchus wellesi, and Scutarx deltatylus. Four partial skeletons collected from the park betw...

Although continents were coalesced into the single landmass Pangea, Late Triassic terrestrial tetrapod assemblages are surprisingly provincial. In eastern North America, we show that assemblages dominated by traversodont cynodonts are restricted to a humid 6° equatorial swath that persisted for over 20 million years characterized by "semiprecessional" (approximately 10,000-y) climatic fluctuati...

The Krasiejów locality in the Upper Triassic of southern Poland yields the tetrapod taxa Cyclotosaurus robustus (= C. intermedius), Metoposaurus diagnosticus (we reject proposed subspecies of this species), Stagonolepis robertsoni, Teratosaurus suevicus (= T. silesiacus), Parasuchus bransoni and Silesaurus opolensis. The occurrences of Parasuchus and Metoposaurus indicate the Krasiejów assembla...

Two species of the unusual archosauromorph Trilophosaurus, T buettneri Case and T jacobsi Murry, are known from diverse localities in the Upper Triassic Chinle Group in the southwestern USA. Both species likely occupied similar ecological niches, based on morphological similarities in the postcrania, which are essentially identical. Trilophosaurus occurrences in the Chinle Group are relatively ...

During the Triassic, Batrachia diverged into ancestors of frogs (Salientia) and salamanders (Caudata). Fossils Triassic batrachians are rare found only in a few outcrops, such as Middle Sakamena Formation Madagascar (Induan). Only three taxa have been described, two early Triadobatrachus Czatkiobatrachus salamander Triassurus. Here we describe right ilium, collected 1991, attributed to first ba...