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Evolution of the amniotic egg allows the amniotes to reproduce on land and lay shelled eggs on dry land. They did not need to return to water for reproduction nor breathing. This adaptation and the desiccation-resistant scales gave them the capability to inhabit the uplands for the first time, albeit making them drink water through their mouths.
Evolution of Neanderthals. 300 ka Gigantopithecus, a giant relative of the orangutan from Asia dies out. 250 ka Anatomically modern humans appear in Africa. [103] [104] [105] Around 50 ka they start colonising the other continents, replacing Neanderthals in Europe and other hominins in Asia. 70 ka Genetic bottleneck in humans (Toba catastrophe ...
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.. Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. [1] Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, [2] as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), [3] indicating ...
The first fully terrestrial vertebrates were reptilian amniotes — their eggs had internal membranes that allowed the developing embryo to breathe but kept water in. This allowed amniotes to lay eggs on dry land, while amphibians generally need to lay their eggs in water (a few amphibians, such as the common Suriname toad, have evolved other ways of getting around this limitation).
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
While reptiles and amphibians can be quite similar externally, the French zoologist Pierre André Latreille recognized the large physiological differences at the beginning of the 19th century and split the herptiles into two classes, giving the four familiar classes of tetrapods: amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
Over time, some of them evolved to have larger body sizes, and by 202 million years ago, ocean titans such as severnensis were likely the largest marine reptiles.
The ancestors of true amniotes, such as Casineria kiddi, which lived about 340 million years ago, evolved from amphibian reptiliomorphs and resembled small lizards. At the late Devonian mass extinction (360 million years ago), all known tetrapods were essentially aquatic and fish-like.