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Plant fruit: the fleshy nutritious part of plants that animal dispense by eating independently came about in flowering plants and in some gymnosperms like: ginkgo and cycads. [239] Water transport systems, like vascular plant systems, with water conducting vessels, independently came about in horsetails, club mosses, ferns, and gymnosperms. [240]
The tetrapods, including all large- and medium-sized land animals, have been among the best understood animals since earliest times. By Aristotle's time, the basic division between mammals, birds and egg-laying tetrapods (the "herptiles") was well known, and the inclusion of the legless snakes into this group was likewise recognized. [28]
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups.
An evolutionary tree (of Amniota, for example, the last common ancestor of mammals and reptiles, and all its descendants) illustrates the initial conditions causing evolutionary patterns of similarity (e.g., all Amniotes produce an egg that possesses the amnios) and the patterns of divergence amongst lineages (e.g., mammals and reptiles ...
Reptiliomorpha (meaning reptile-shaped; in PhyloCode known as Pan-Amniota [2] [3]) is a clade containing the amniotes and those tetrapods that share a more recent common ancestor with amniotes than with living amphibians (lissamphibians).
Vertebrate zoology is the biological discipline that consists of the study of vertebrate animals, that is animals with a backbone, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. The various taxonomically oriented disciplines i.e. mammalogy , biological anthropology , herpetology , ornithology , and ichthyology seek to identify and ...
The largest living amphibian is the 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in) Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) [41] but this is a great deal smaller than the largest amphibian that ever existed—the extinct 9 m (30 ft) Prionosuchus, a crocodile-like temnospondyl dating to 270 million years ago from the middle Permian of Brazil. [42]
The term polyphyly, or polyphyletic, derives from the two Ancient Greek words πολύς (polús) 'many, a lot of', and φῦλον (phûlon) 'genus, species', [8] [9] and refers to the fact that a polyphyletic group includes organisms (e.g., genera, species) arising from multiple ancestral sources.