Shringasaurus: new rhynchocephalian lepidosaur with horns

Sengupta, Ezcurra and Bandyopadhyay 2017 bring us
a new, very large, horned rhynchocephalian lepidosaur, Shringasaurus (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, that’s not how the Sengupta team nested it (due to the sin of taxon exclusion, see below). Even so, there is consensus that the new taxon is closely related to the much smaller Azendohsaurus (Fig. 1).

From the abstract:
“The early evolution of archosauromorphs (bird- and crocodile-line archosaurs and stem-archosaurs) represents an important case of adaptive radiation that occurred in the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Here we enrich the early archosauromorph record with the description of a moderately large (3–4 m in total length), herbivorous new allokotosaurian, Shringasaurus indicus, from the early Middle Triassic of India. The most striking feature of Shringasaurus indicus is the presence of a pair of large supraorbital horns that resemble those of some ceratopsid dinosaurs. The presence of horns in the new species is dimorphic and, as occurs in horned extant bovid mammals, these structures were probably sexually selected and used as weapons in intraspecific combats. The relatively large size and unusual anatomy of Shringasaurus indicus broadens the morphological diversity of Early–Middle Triassic tetrapods and complements the understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms involved in the early archosauromorph diversification.”

Allokotosauria
Shringasaurus was nested in the clade, Allokotosauria, According to Wikipedia, “Nesbitt et al. (2015) defined the group as a  containing Azendohsaurus madagaskarensis and Trilophosaurus buettneri and all taxa more closely related to them than to Tanystropheus longobardicus, Proterosuchus fergusi, Protorosaurus speneri or Rhynchosaurus articeps.” This definition was based on the invalidated hypothesis that rhynchosaurs and allokotosaurs were close to the base of the Archosauriformes as the addition of more taxa will demonstrate. Basically this clade equals Trilophosaurus, Azendohsaurus and now Shringasaurus. In the large reptile tree (LRT) this clade nests between Sapheosaurus + Notesuchus and Mesosuchus + Rhynchosauria all nesting within Sphenodontia (=  Rhynchocephalia), so they are all lepidosaurs. All you have to do is add pertinent taxa to make this happen in your own phylogenetic analysis.

Coincidentally the 1960 film,
The Lost World featured an iguana made up with horns similar to those of Shringasaurus.

References
Sengupta S, Ezcurra MD and Bandyopadhyay S 2017. A new horned and long-necked herbivorous stem-archosaur from the Middle Triassic of India. Nature, Scientific Reports 7: 8366 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-08658-8 online here.

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