Telkaralura
Telkaralura is a genus of large gracilisuchid pseudosuchian from the early Late Triassic Chañares Formation of Argentina.
History and naming
The Telkaralura holotype specimen is a partial skull, PULR-V 057, discovered by the Argentine paleontologist José F. Bonaparte in 1980 within the Massetognathus-Chanaresuchus AZ of the Chañares Formation, the same sediments that also yielded the smaller Gracilisuchus. While Bonaparte never fully described the fossil material, he figured PULR-V 057 twice, once in 1996 and then again in 2007, both times suggesting that the specimen represented an early dinosaur or an ancestor of dinosaurs, an idea Bonaparte also extended onto Gracilisuchus.In 2009, Julia Desojo and Andrea Arcucci recognized that the specimen actually represented a pseudosuchian, a crocodile-line archosaur, but interpreted it as a juvenile individual of the genus Luperosuchus. Although the specimen differed from Luperosuchus including a less developed 'roman-nose' and being a third smaller in size, these were interpreted as ontogenetic variation as the material appeared to exhibit juvenile features, including loose sutures and less developed ornamentation of the bones. In 2017, the referral of this material to Luperosuchus was questioned by Sterling Nesbitt and Desojo, who suggested that the differences between PULR-V 057 and the holotype of Luperosuchus are taxonomic rather than ontogenetic, recognizing that it represented its own unique taxon, though it was not given a name at the time. Despite being regarded as a distinct taxon, PULR-V 057 went largely ignored in subsequent years, until eventually being given a full description by Maria Belen von Baczko and colleagues, who placed it in the family Gracilisuchidae and coined the name Telkaralura.
The name Telkaralura comes from the Cacán language spoken by the Diaguita people of northwestern Argentina and is composed of the words "Télkara" and "lúra", meaning "mother earth" and "lizard" respectively. The scientific name is derived from the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, short CONICET, an Argentinian government agency for the promotion of scientific and technological development.