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Chordate fossils have been found from as early as the Cambrian explosion over 539 million years ago. [11] Of the more than 81,000 [ 12 ] living species of chordates, about half are ray-finned fishes ( class Actinopterygii ) and the vast majority of the rest are tetrapods , a terrestrial clade of lobe-finned fishes ( Sarcopterygii ) who evolved ...
This article contains a list of all of the classes and orders that are located in the phylum Chordata. The subphyla Tunicata and Vertebrata are in the unranked Olfactores clade, while the subphylum Cephalochordata is not. Animals in Olfactores are characterized as having a more advanced olfactory system than animals not in it.
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).
Chordata: Clade: Olfactores: Subphylum: Vertebrata: Infraphylum: Gnathostomata Gegenbauer, 1874: Subgroups †Placodermi (paraphyletic) Eugnathostomata. Total group Chondrichthyes †Acanthodii (paraphyletic) Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes) Osteichthyes (bony fish, including tetrapods)
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.
Blue skin pigmentation is not to be confused with the biological alteration of (for example) feathers in birds -- that appear blue via an evolved prism mechanism in the feather structure. There still is a lot of differential (DNA sequence based) comparison research going on that is trying to separate out the simplest forms of chordata.
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.
The term "fish" describes any non-tetrapod chordate, (i.e., an animal with a backbone), that has gills throughout life and has limbs, if any, in the shape of fins. [8] Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are paraphyletic, since the tetrapod clade is within the clade of lobe-finned fishes. [9] [10]