South American Late Creteaceous Meraxes gigas enters the LRT with earlier theropods from China

Meraxes gigas
Canale et al 2022; Late Cretaceous, Late Cenomian, Argentina, MMCh-PV 65, skull length 1.2m) is the “Campanas carcharodontosaurid.”

Carcharodontosaurus
has not been tested in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2201 taxa), but it lived in Late Cretaceous North Africa. Not enough of it is known to test here.

Here, in the LRT,
South American Meraxes nests between two earlier Chinese taxa, Sinraptor and Yutyrannus in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2201 taxa). The forelimbs and metatarsals are shorter on Meraxes than on those two relatives. The pubis is concave anteriorly. These traits converge with Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs.

Sinraptor is a traditional metriacanthosaurid from Late Jurassic China.
Metriocanthosaurus has not been tested in the LRT, but also lived in Late Jurassic China.
Yutyrannus has been tested in the LRT (subset Fig 3). It lived in China during the Early Cretaceous, with allosaurs and carnotaurids, not with tyrannosaurs.

Given the present data
and scoring in the LRT (subset Fig 3), Late Cretaceous Meraxes was a late-surviving giant theropod from an earlier radiation from China. Middle Jurassic Proceratosaurus from England was close to the ancestral lineage of this clade. So, this was a world-wide clade (sans North America).

On another topic: taxon exclusion
Graybeal 1998 reported, “If taxa can be added to break up long branches, it is much more preferable to add taxa than characters.“

The LRT supports this hypothesis.

References
Canale JI et al (9 co-authors) 2022. New giant carnivorous dinosaur reveals convergent evolutionary trends in theropod arm reduction. Current Biology. 32(14): 3195–3202.e5.
Graybeal A 1998. Is it better to add taxa or characters to a difficult phylogenetic problem? Systematic Biology 47(1):9–17.
Mackovicy P et al (9 co-authors) 2022. A new carcharodontosaurid from the Neuquén Group, Patagonia, Argentina, with a near complete skull and forelimbs informs evolutionary trends in theropod arm reduction. SVP abstracts p240.

wiki/Yutyrannus
wiki/Tanycolagreus
wiki/Sinraptor
wiki/Meraxes