The name
Spinosauroidea is sometimes used in place of Megalosauroidea. The superfamily Spinosauroidea was named in 1915 by
Ernst Stromer. It is a synonym of Megalosauroidea in almost all modern phylogenetic analyses, and it is therefore redundant. Spinosauroidea was defined as a
clade in 1998 by
Paul Sereno as the node clade containing the common ancestor of
Spinosaurus and
Torvosaurus and all its descendants. Thomas Holtz in 2004 defined a branch clade with the same name containing all species closer to
Spinosaurus than to
Passer domesticus. The
ICZN holds that even clade names (which do not yet have any governing body) should be replaced if having a traditional taxon suffix and being synonyms of ranked taxa at or below the superfamily level. The seniority of Megalosauroidea was not followed in most paleontological literature during the 1990s and early 2000s. A series of papers supporting the validity of
Megalosaurus as a genus, the relationships of megalosauroids, and the placement of "spinosauroids" among them, published between 2008 and 2010 argued that Megalosauroidea was in fact the valid name for the group. The classification of megalosauroids follows a study by Benson in 2010. Note that several "wildcard" These are known from remains too fragmentary to be reliably classified. }} In 2019, Rauhut and Pol described
Asfaltovenator vialidadi, a basal allosauroid displaying a mosaic of primitive and derived features seen within
Tetanurae. Their phylogenetic analysis found traditional Megalosauroidea to represent a basal
grade of carnosaurs,
paraphyletic with respect to
Allosauroidea. }} }} ==See also==