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e. Reptiles arose about 320 million years ago [1] during the Carboniferous period. Reptiles, in the traditional sense of the term, are defined as animals that have scales or scutes, lay land-based hard-shelled eggs, and possess ectothermic metabolisms. So defined, the group is paraphyletic, excluding endothermic animals like birds that are ...
Reptiles, as commonly defined, are a group of tetrapods with an ectothermic ('cold-blooded') metabolism and amniotic development. Living reptiles comprise four orders: Testudines (turtles), Crocodilia (crocodilians), Squamata (lizards and snakes), and Rhynchocephalia (the tuatara). As of May 2023, about 12,000 living species of reptiles are ...
Pterodactylus (from Ancient Greek: πτεροδάκτυλος, romanized: pterodáktylos 'winged finger'[2]) is a genus of extinct pterosaurs. It is thought to contain only a single species, Pterodactylus antiquus, which was the first pterosaur to be named and identified as a flying reptile and one of the first prehistoric reptiles to ever be ...
Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, [1] ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other ...
539 Ma – present. The Phanerozoic Eon (Greek: period of well-displayed life) marks the appearance in the fossil record of abundant, shell-forming and/or trace-making organisms. It is subdivided into three eras, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, with major mass extinctions at division points.
[24] [206] Alternatively, they may have used stored yolk products for nourishment during their first few days of life, as in modern reptiles, rather than depend on parents for food. [205] Fossilised Hamipterus nests were shown preserving many male and female pterosaurs together with their eggs in a manner to a similar to that of modern seabird ...
The Plesiosauria[ a ][ 4 ] or plesiosaurs are an order or clade of extinct Mesozoic marine reptiles, belonging to the Sauropterygia. Plesiosaurs first appeared in the latest Triassic Period, possibly in the Rhaetian stage, about 203 million years ago. [ 5 ] They became especially common during the Jurassic Period, thriving until their ...
Synapsida[a] is one of the two major clades of vertebrate animals in the group Amniota, the other being the Sauropsida (which includes reptiles and birds). The synapsids were the dominant land animals in the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic, but the only group that survived into the Cenozoic are mammals. [7]