Archelosauria
clade of reptiles (Reptilia)
Archelosauria is a clade grouping turtles and archosaurs (birds and crocodilians) and their closest
relatives, to the exclusion of lepidosaurs (the clade containing lizards, snakes and the tuatara). Most phylogenetic analyses based on molecular data (e.g. DNA and proteins) have supported a sister-group relationship between turtles and archosaurs. On the other hand, Archelosauria had not been historically supported by most morphological analyses, which have instead found turtles to either be descendants of parareptiles, early-diverging diapsids outside of Sauria, or close relatives of lepidosaurs within the clade Ankylopoda. Some recent morphological analyses have also found support for Archelosauria.
Classification
Multiple sequence alignments of DNA and protein sequences and phylogenetic inferences have shown that turtles are the closest living relatives to birds and crocodilians. There are about 1000 ultra-conserved elements in the genome that are unique to turtles and archosaurs, but which are not found in lepidosaurs. Other genome-wide analyses also support this grouping.
Archelosauria was named in a 2015 article by Crawford et al. The name is meant to evoke the archosaurs and chelonians (turtles), the two living subgroups of the clade.
The public source identifies “Archelosauria” as clade of reptiles (Reptilia). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Archelosauria, clade and reptiles.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19595522. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1000 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Archelosauria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.