Sebecosuchia (meaning "Sobek crocodiles") is an extinct group of mesoeucrocodylian crocodyliforms that includes the families Sebecidae and Baurusuchidae. The group was long thought to have first appeared in the Late Cretaceous with the baurusuchids, but Razanandrongobe pushes the origin of Sebecosuchia to the Middle Jurassic. The last surviving members of the group, the sebecids, appear to have lasted until the late Miocene or early Pliocene on the Greater Antilles. Fossils have been found primarily from South America but have also been found in Europe, North Africa, Madagascar, and the Indian
Sebecosuchia (meaning "Sobek crocodiles") is an extinct group of mesoeucrocodylian crocodyliforms that includes the families Sebecidae and Baurusuchidae. The group was long thought to have first appeared in the Late Cretaceous with the baurusuchids, but Razanandrongobe pushes the origin of Sebecosuchia to the Middle Jurassic. The last surviving members of the group, the sebecids, appear to have lasted until the late Miocene or early Pliocene on the Greater Antilles. Fossils have been found primarily from South America but have also been found in Europe, North Africa, Madagascar, and the Indian subcontinent.
==History and phylogeny== Sebecosuchia was first constructed in 1937 by George Gaylord Simpson. In 1946 the concept was again used by American paleontologist Edwin Colbert to include Sebecus and Baurusuchidae. Sebecus, which had been known from South America since 1937, was an unusual crocodyliform with a deep snout and teeth that were ziphodont, or serrated and laterally compressed. The family Baurusuchidae was named the year before and included the newly described Baurusuchus, which was also a South American deep-snouted form. The clade Sebecosuchia was given a phylogenetic definition in the PhyloCode by Juan Leardi and colleagues in 2024 as "the least inclusive clade containing Sebecus icaeorhinus and Baurusuchus pachecoi provided that it doesn't include Araripesuchus gomesii, Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, or Crocodylus niloticus (the Nile crocodile)". This definition ensures that Sebecosuchia self destructs if peirosaurids, uruguaysuchids, or modern crocodylians fall within the last common ancestor and all descendants of baurusuchids and sebecids.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).