Gavialis, the gharial, enters the LRT as an overlooked ‘living fossil’

The extant gharial (= gavial) is obviously different
from the other extant crocodiles, alligators and caimans. That’s because it IS phylogenetically different, more different than professors have thought and undergrads have been taught.

According to the LRT
(Fig. 6), the Thalattosuchia, the marine croc clade of the Early Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, now has a living representative, the gharial, Gavialis.

Thalattosuchia are traditional members
of the former paraphyletic clade Mesosuchia and more recently renamed, Mesoeucrocodylia, To be considered monophyletic a clade must include all descendants: in this case, extant crocs and their closest extinct kin (= Eusuchia). There is a short list of traits that differentiate the mesosuschs from the eususchs. In eusuchians the choanae are completely surrounded by pterygoid bones.

Gavialis has that trait,
but did it evolve in parallel from a teleosaur – thalattosuchian ancestor over the last 150 million years? The LRT says so. We don’t want to “Pull a Larry Martin” now, relying on one or a few traits to define a clade. Rather, we want to figure out a last common ancestor using all the traits in the LRT from snout to tail tip and let convergence happen, even if it upsets an old order.

The following longer video
reports the false gharial is a member of the gavialidae. Toward the end, in a desperate effort to show a skeleton, the videographers substituted a Champsosaurus in two view. Yow!

Another gharial video (46 minutes) with host Nick Baker (2018),
IMHO he’s being groomed and introduced to be the next David Attenborough. Good choice!