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As aquatic tetrapods began their transition to land, several skeletal changes are thought to have occurred to allow for movement and respiration on land. Some adaptations required to adjust to non-aquatic life include the movement and use of alternating limbs, the use of pelvic appendages as sturdy propulsors, and the use of a solid surface at ...
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
At any rate, it demonstrates that the fish–tetrapod transition was accompanied by significant character incongruence in functionally important structures.". [70] p. 638. From the end of the Devonian to the Mid Carboniferous a 30 million year gap occurs in the fossil record.
The Devonian period (419–359 Mya), also known as the Age of Fishes, saw the development of early sharks, armoured placoderms and various lobe-finned fish, including the tetrapod transitional species. The evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion.
A notable characteristic that make a tetrapod's skull different from a fish's are the relative frontal and rear portion lengths. The fish had a long rear portion while the front was short; the orbital vacuities were thus located towards the anterior end. In the tetrapod, the front of the skull lengthened, positioning the orbits farther back on ...
Therefore, Panderichthys can only be a "late-surviving relic", [14] showing traits that evolved during the transition from fish-like creatures to tetrapods, but whose date does not reflect that transition. The tracks "force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish–tetrapod transition, as well as the ...
Tetrapodomorpha (also known as Choanata [3]) is a clade of vertebrates consisting of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) and their closest sarcopterygian relatives that are more closely related to living tetrapods than to living lungfish.
Several groups of tetrapods have undergone secondary aquatic adaptation, an evolutionary transition from being purely terrestrial to living at least part of the time in water. These animals are called "secondarily aquatic" because although their ancestors lived on land for hundreds of millions of years, they all originally descended from ...