Crosbysaurus
Crosbysaurus is a genus of extinct archosauromorph that lived in the Late Triassic of Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah. It is known from the Chinle Formation and Dockum Group rock units from the southwestern United States. The type species is C. harrisae, and the only known material includes teeth. 11 specimens are known, each including a single tooth.

Robert Gay, Isabella Aude · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- ArchosauriformesPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Diapsida
Time the record covers
At most 32 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 237 Mya and 205.7 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
11 occurrences of Crosbysaurus on record, most of them in the Late Triassic. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
11 occurrences- Late Triassic100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
4 formations
- Chinle Formation4
- Tecovas Formation · Chinle Group4
- Bluewater Creek Formation · Chinle Group2
- Cumnock Formation · Chatham Group1
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The named rock units Crosbysaurus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Crosbysaurus and its relatives
Late TriassicWhere Crosbysaurus and its relatives were recorded in the Late Triassic.
Found in the same rock
87 taxa- Actinopterygii5 sites
- Archosauriformes5 sites
- Metoposauridae5 sites
- Redfieldiidae5 sites
- Mystriosuchinae4 sites
- Osteichthyes4 sites
- Reptilia4 sites
- Turseodus4 sites
- Cynodontia3 sites
- Hybodontiformes3 sites
- Lonchidion humblei3 sites
- Ornithischia3 sites
- Phytosauria3 sites
- Revueltosaurus3 sites
- Semionotidae3 sites
- Stagonolepididae3 sites
- Suchia3 sites
- Trilophosaurus buettneri3 sites
- Triodus moorei3 sites
- Aetosauria2 sites
- Arganodus2 sites
- Arganodus dorotheae2 sites
- Chondrichthyes2 sites
- Coelacanthidae2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Crosbysaurus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
4 references- Late Triassic microvertebrates from the lower Chinle Group (Otischalkian-Adamanian: Carnian), southwestern U.S.A.8
- First occurrence of Doswellia cf. D. kaltenbachi (Archosauriformes) from the Late Triassic (middle Norian) Chinle Formation of Arizona and its implications on proposed biostratigraphic correlations across North America during the Late Triassic1
- The first occurrence of the enigmatic archosauriform Crosbysaurus Heckert 2004 from the Chinle Formation of southern Utah1
- Diverse new microvertebrate assemblage from the Upper Triassic Cumnock Formation, Sanford subbasin, North Carolina, USA1
Each of the 11 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Crosbysaurus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Robert Gay, Isabella Aude
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Crosbysaurus was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itArchosauriformes through timeFormations of the Late TriassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Heckert 2004