Mesosuchus

Mesosuchus ("middle crocodile") is an extinct genus of basal rhynchosaur from early Middle Triassic (early Anisian stage) deposits of Eastern Cape, South Africa. It is known from the holotype SAM 5882, a partial skeleton, and from the paratypes SAM 6046, SAM 6536, SAM 7416 and SAM 7701 from the Aliwal North Euparkeria site. Mesosuchus is quite small, spanning around 30 cm in length. Mesosuchus was discovered and named by D. M. S. Watson in 1912.

== Discovery and naming == Bones of Mesosuchus were first found by David Meredith Seares Watson in 1912 after examining a block of sandstone kept in a private collection of Alfred Brown. This block was found in the middle deposits of the Burgersdorp Formation, in the Cynognathus Assemblage Zone near the town of Aliwal North in the Cape Province of South Africa. The block of sandstone contained many intermingled partial skeletons of several small reptiles, and after careful sorting, Watson considered the unidentified skeletons to belong to a single species, which he named Mesosuchus browni. As the etymology of the name suggests, Watson believed that Mesosuchus was an ancestral crocodile with close affinities to other presumed primitive crocodilians such as Proterosuchus, Erythrosuchus, and Ornithosuchus. However, in 1913, Robert Broom looked more closely at the partial skeletons and immediately determined it to be in fact skeletons of two distinct, though related, species. Broom designated an articulated skeleton with a single external naris and a pair of supposed acrodont premaxillary teeth as the type of Mesosuchus, and the remainder of the specimens were assigned to a new genus and species, Euparkeria capensis.