Sennikov (1988) and Gower and Sennikov (2000) suggested that
Dongusuchus was a lightly-built
rauisuchian with a long,
sigmoidally curved (S-shaped) neck, unlike the more typical robust short-necked rauisuchians that appear later in the
Triassic.
Dongusuchus was also excluded from Archosauria by Niedźwiedzki et al. (2014) and a new large cladistic analysis of archosauromorphs by Ezcurra (2016) found
Dongusuchus to be the
sister taxon to the Indian
Yarasuchus. Both
Dongusuchus and
Yarasuchus were recovered in a clade with
Spondylosoma and
Teleocrater by Nesbitt et al. (2017) at the base of
Avemetatarsalia. In other words, they would qualify as early bird-line archosaurs, more closely related to
pterosaurs and
dinosaurs (including birds) rather than
crocodilians. ==References==