Azendohsaurus

Azendohsaurus is an extinct genus of herbivorous archosauromorph reptile from roughly the late Middle to early Late Triassic Period of Morocco and Madagascar. The type species, Azendohsaurus laaroussii, was described and named by Jean-Michel Dutuit in 1972 based on partial jaw fragments and some teeth from Morocco. A second species from Madagascar, A. madagaskarensis, was first described in 2010 by John J. Flynn and colleagues from a multitude of specimens representing almost the entire skeleton. The generic name "Azendoh lizard" is for the village of Azendoh, a local village near where it was first discovered in the Atlas Mountains. It was a bulky quadruped that unlike other early archosauromorphs had a relatively short tail and robust limbs that were held in an odd mix of sprawled hind limbs and raised forelimbs. It had a long neck and a proportionately small head with remarkably sauropod-like jaws and teeth.

Azendohsaurus used to be classified as a herbivorous dinosaur, at first as an ornithischian but more often as a "prosauropod" sauropodomorph. This was based only on its jaws and teeth, which share derived features typically found in herbivorous dinosaurs. The complete skeletal material from Madagascar, however, revealed more basal characteristics ancestral to Archosauromorpha and that Azendohsaurus was not a dinosaur at all. Instead, Azendohsaurus was actually a more primitive archosauromorph that had convergently evolved many features of the jaws and skeleton shared with the later giant sauropod dinosaurs. It was found to be a member of a newly recognised group of specialised, mostly herbivorous archosauromorphs that was named the Allokotosauria. It is also the namesake and typifier of its own family of allokotosaurs, the Azendohsauridae; initially the only member, the family now includes other similar allokotosaurs, such as the larger, horned azendohsaurid Shringasaurus from India.