Avemetatarsalia
clade of archosaurian reptiles (Archosauria)
Avemetatarsalia (meaning "bird metatarsals") is a clade of diapsid reptiles containing all archosaurs more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. The two most successful groups of avemetatarsalians were the dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Dinosaurs were the largest terrestrial animals for much of the Mesozoic Era, and one group of small feathered dinosaurs (Aves, i.e. birds) has survived up to the present day. Pterosaurs were the first flying vertebrates and persisted through the Mesozoic before dying out at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. Both dinosaurs and pterosaurs appeared in the Triassic Period, shortly after avemetatarsalians as a whole. The name Avemetatarsalia was first established by British palaeontologist Michael Benton in 1999. An alternate name is Pan-Aves, or "all birds", in reference to its definition containing all animals, living or extinct, which are more closely related to birds than to crocodilians.
Although dinosaurs and pterosaurs were the only avemetatarsalians to survive past the end of the Triassic, other groups flourished during the Triassic. The most basal (earliest-branching) and plesiomorphic ("primitive") known avemetatarsalians were the aphanosaurs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Avemetatarsalia” is clade of archosaurian reptiles (Archosauria). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Avemetatarsalia, clade and archosaurian, not as a finished interpretation.
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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 May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133187. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Avemetatarsalia” 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.