Paul Sereno et al., in 2002, considered Cathayornis a junior synonym of Sinornis.
It was first defined as a clade in 1998 by Paul Sereno, who made it the group of all birds closer to living birds than to Enantiornithes (represented by Sinornis).
Gadoufaoua (Touareg for “the place where camels fear to go”) is a site in the Tenere desert of Niger known for its extensive fossil graveyard, where remains of Sarcosuchus imperator, popularly known as SuperCroc, have been found (by Paul Sereno in 1997, for example), including vertebrae, limb bones, armor plates, jaws, and a nearly complete 6-foot (1.8 m) skull.
However, more recent work by Paul Sereno has suggested that it may actually represent one of the most primitive of all known ornithischian dinosaurs.
Paul Sereno, for example, considered the family Omnivoropterygidae to be invalid because it is redundant and was not given a phylogenetic definition.
Paul Sereno et al. (2001) considered a similar prehistoric bird species from the same formation, Cathayornis, to be a junior synonym of Sinornis.
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It has been nicknamed "PancakeCroc" by Paul Sereno and Hans Larsson, who first described the genus in a monograph published in ZooKeys in 2009 along with other Saharan crocodyliformes such as Anatosuchus and Kaprosuchus.
Because of this traditionally polyphyletic use, some scientists, such as Paul Sereno, reject the family name Megalosauridae in favor of Torvosauridae (coined by Jensen in 1985), despite the fact that Megalosauridae has priority under the ICZN rules governing family-level names in zoology.
Paleontologists Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, Jeff Wilson of the University of Michigan, and Srivastava worked together as an Indo–American group to study the Narmada River fossils.
Therizinosauridae was first given a phylogenetic definition by Paul Sereno in 1998, who defined it as all dinosaurs closer to Erlikosaurus than to Ornithomimus.
Stephen Brusatte and Paul Sereno reported a second species of Carcharodontosaurus, found in the Echkar Formation of Niger, differing from C. saharicus in some aspects of the maxilla and braincase.