a front end in the form of a lobe. The third neck vertebra has a low rectangular spine. The crescent-shaped wrist bone is very flat. The first metacarpal has a broadly expanding contact surface with the second metacarpal. The foot of the pubic bone is notched from behind. In general the skull is rather flat, its height being less than three times its length, which cannot be exactly determined because the praemaxillae are lacking. The maxilla, which has a long front branch, bears fourteen teeth, as can be deduced from the tooth sockets: the teeth themselves have been lost. There is a small maxillary fenestra, which does not reach the edge of the antorbital depression and is located behind a promaxillary fenestra. The lacrimal bone has a distinctive rounded horn on top. The lower branch of the postorbital bone is transversely wide. The jugal bone is short, deep and pneumatised. Classification Most analyses place Afrovenator within the Megalosauridae, which was formerly a "wastebasket family" which contained many large and hard-to-classify theropods, but has since been redefined in a meaningful way, as a sister taxon to the family Spinosauridae within the Megalosauroidea. A 2002 analysis, focused mainly on the noasaurids, found Afrovenator to be a basal megalosaurid. However, it did not include Dubreuillosaurus (formerly Poekilopleuron valesdunensis), which could affect the results in that region of the cladogram (Carrano et al. 2002). Other more recent and more complete cladistic analyses show Afrovenator in a group of Megalosauridae with Eustreptospondylus and Dubreuillosaurus. This group is either called Megalosaurinae (Allain 2002) or Eustreptospondylinae (Holtz et al. 2004). The latter study also includes Piatnitzkysaurus in this taxon. A study by Matthew Carrano from 2012 placed Afrovenator in a megalosaurid Afrovenatorinae. A few alternative hypotheses have been presented for Afrovenators relationships. In Sereno's original description, Afrovenator was found to be a basal spinosauroid (he at the time used the name "Torvosauroidea"), outside of Spinosauridae and Megalosauridae (which he called "Torvosauridae"). Finally, another recent study places Afrovenator outside of the Megalosauroidea completely, and instead finds it more closely related to Allosaurus (Rauhut 2003). This is the only study to draw this conclusion. The phylogeny according to Carrano et al. (2012) is shown by this cladogram. References Further reading Holtz, T.R., Molnar, R.E., Currie, P.J. (2004). "Basal Tetanurae". In: Weishampel, D.B., Dodson, P., & Osmolska, H. (eds.). The Dinosauria (2nd edition). Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 71–110.