We furthermore explore the impacts of tooth position and cranial robustness on phytosaur microwear textures. Here, we apply dental microwear textural analysis to the three-dimensional sub-micrometre scale tooth surface textures that form during food consumption to provide the first quantitative dietary constraints for five species of phytosaur. However, these dietary hypotheses are difficult to test, meaning that phytosaur ecologies and their roles in Triassic food webs remain incompletely constrained. They have often been interpreted as carnivorous or piscivorous due to their large size, morphological similarity to extant crocodilians and preservation in fluvial, lacustrine and coastal deposits. Phytosaurs are a group of large, semi-aquatic archosaurian reptiles from the Middle–Late Triassic.
