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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 ]
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.
Amniotes are distinguished from the other living tetrapod clade — the non-amniote lissamphibians (frogs/toads, salamanders/newts and caecilians) — by the development of three extraembryonic membranes (amnion for embryonic protection, chorion for gas exchange, and allantois for metabolic waste disposal or storage), thicker and keratinized ...
The distinction between quadrupeds and tetrapods is important in evolutionary biology, particularly in the context of tetrapods whose limbs have adapted to other roles (e.g., hands in the case of humans, wings in the case of birds and bats, and fins in the case of whales). All of these animals are tetrapods, but not all are quadrupeds.
Several groups of tetrapods, such as the reptillian snakes and mammalian cetaceans, have lost some or all of their limbs, and many tetrapods have returned to partially aquatic or (in the case of cetaceans and sirenians) fully aquatic lives. The tetrapods evolved from the lobe-finned fishes about 395 million years ago in the Devonian. [23]
Though stem-tetrapods originated in the preceding Devonian, it was in the earliest Carboniferous that the first crown tetrapods appeared, with full scaleless skin and five digits. During this time, amphibians (including many extinct groups unrelated to modern forms, referred to as "basal tetrapods") were the predominant tetrapods, and included ...
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. In preparation for the coming December holidays ...
Until recently, the view of most ichthyologists has been that Osteichthyes were paraphyletic and include only bony fishes. [8] However, since 2013 widely cited ichthyology papers have been published with phylogenetic trees that treat the Osteichthyes as a clade including tetrapods, making the terms Euteleostomi and Osteichthyes synonymous.