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The water-based lateral line system was used substantially by these aquatic tetrapods to detect danger from predators. [2] Within the Osteichthyan diversification, there were no changes related to respiration in the transition as can be seen by the nasal region and palatal morphology in elpistostegalid fishes.
Several groups of tetrapods have undergone secondary aquatic adaptation, an evolutionary transition from being purely terrestrial to living at least part of the time in water. These animals are called "secondarily aquatic" because although their ancestors lived on land for hundreds of millions of years, they all originally descended from ...
Marine tetrapods are tetrapods that returned from land back to the sea again. The first returns to the ocean may have occurred as early as the Carboniferous Period [ 20 ] whereas other returns occurred as recently as the Cenozoic , as in cetaceans, pinnipeds , [ 21 ] and several modern amphibians .
However, most tetrapod species today are amniotes, most of which are terrestrial tetrapods whose branch evolved from earlier tetrapods early in the Late Carboniferous. The key innovation in amniotes over amphibians is the amnion , which enables the eggs to retain their aqueous contents on land, rather than needing to stay in water.
The vertebrate land invasion refers to the transition of vertebrate animals from being aquatic/semiaquatic to predominantly terrestrial during the Late Devonian period. This transition allowed some vertebrates to escape competitive pressure from other aquatic animals and explore niches on land, [1] which eventually established the vertebrates as the dominant terrestrial phylum.
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.
Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism's body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism's water content; that is, it maintains the fluid balance and the concentration of electrolytes (salts in solution which in this case is represented by body fluid) to keep the body fluids from becoming too diluted or concentrated.
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.