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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.
In effect, "tetrapod" is a name reserved solely for animals which lie among living tetrapods, so-called crown tetrapods. This is a node-based clade , a group with a common ancestry descended from a single "node" (the node being the nearest common ancestor of living species).
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.
Tiktaalik, a tetrapodomorph with wrists, straddles the fish-tetrapod divide. The Stem Tetrapoda are a cladistically defined group, consisting of all animals more closely related to extant four-legged vertebrates than to their closest extant relatives (the lungfish), but excluding the crown group Tetrapoda.
Eotetrapodiformes is a clade of tetrapodomorphs including the four-limbed vertebrates ("tetrapods" in the traditional sense) and their closest finned relatives, two groups of stem tetrapods called tristichopterids and elpistostegalids.
Stem tetrapods are the animals belonging to the lineage leading to tetrapods from their divergence from the lungfish, our nearest relatives among the fishes. In addition to a series of lobe-finned fishes , they also include some of the early labyrinthodonts .
Articles relating to the Tetrapodomorpha, 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
Articles relating to the Stegocephalia, a name used for four-limbed stem-tetrapods, and their amphibian-grade descendants, and in phylogenetic nomenclature for all tetrapods. The term was coined in 1868 by American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope .