Marshosaurus [SEP] parent taxon
Marshosaurus
Marshosaurus is a genus of medium-sized carnivorous theropod dinosaur, belonging to the Megalosauroidea, from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of Utah and possibly Colorado.
Description.
"Marshosaurus" was medium-sized for a theropod. In 2010, Gregory S. Paul estimated its length at and its weight at . The holotype ilium has a length of . If the cranial material is correctly referred, the skull was about long.
In 2012, Matthew Carrano established one autapomorphy, a unique derived trait of the holotype
Taxon in disguise
In bacteriology, a taxon in disguise is a species, genus or higher unit of biological classification whose evolutionary history reveals has evolved from another unit of similar or lower rank, making the parent unit paraphyletic. This happens when rapid evolution makes a new species appear radically different from the ancestral group, so that it is not (initially) recognised as belonging to the parent phylogenetic group, leaving the latter an evolutionary grade.
While the term is from bacteriology, parallel examples are found throughout the tree of