Archosauromorpha is a large grouping of reptiles including the Archosauria and other related taxa, such as phytosaurs, rhynchosaurs, and tanystropheids. Phylogenetically, Archosauria contains both crocodilians and birds, as well as several extinct groups (e.g., dinosaurs, pterosaurs, etc.). Crocodilians and their extinct relatives belong to the group Pseudosuchia, whereas birds, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and a few other animals lie within Avemetatarsalia. Creationists can agree or disagree with these taxonomic groupings, but all creationists would concur that these animals do not share a single common ancestor. Rather, Scripture clearly teaches that God created separate kinds of animals, including different kinds of birds, which indicates that both Archosauromorpha and Archosauria must consist of multiple created kinds. Both fossil and extant archosaurs have been the subject of several baraminological studies, with work on avemetatarsalians (e.g., Wood 2005; Doran et al. 2018) greatly outnumbering the number of studies on pseudosuchians (e.g., Frederico and McLain 2020). Although there is still much work to be done with archosaurs, the non-archosaur archosauromorph taxa pale in comparison with only one published baraminological study (Phytosauria: Grimes and McLain 2017). Although all extinct and less well-known than archosaurs, non-archosaur archosauromorphs vary greatly in morphology and ecology and are thus of great interest to creationists interested in earth history. Many of these groups are exclusively Triassic, suddenly appearing and disappearing in the fossil record. As such, creationists would predict that there are likely multiple created kinds of non-archosaur archosauromorphs.
To investigate the baraminic status of Archosauromorpha, we propose using BARCLAY v. 1.0 (developed by Todd Wood, https://coresci.org/barclay) to analyze a recently published dataset (Kellner et al. 2022) with statistical baraminology methods—baraminic distance correlation (BDC) with bootstrapping and 3D multidimensional scaling (MDS). Given the suspected large number of baramins included in the dataset, we anticipate splitting the dataset into smaller subsections reflective of taxonomic groups within Archosauromorpha (as in Wood 2005 and other studies). We anticipate that statistical baraminological analysis of these taxa will help us discern a preliminary estimate for the number of non-archosaur archosauromorph baramins, which probably represent the number of created kinds and ark kinds. We expect this study to provide the creationist scientific community with: 1) better numbers for estimating how many animals were on the ark, 2) a greater appreciation for the diversity and disparity in God’s creation, 3) increased knowledge of Triassic reptile groups that will aid creationists in understanding the pre-Flood world and its ecosystems and the depositional events of Noah’s Flood.