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[6] [11] Nevertheless, Haeckel considered the caecilians to be closely related to what he called Lissamphibia (gr. λισσός, smooth), which is now called Batrachia and includes frogs and salamanders. In the early to mid 20th century, a biphyletic origin of amphibians (and thus of tetrapods in general) was favoured.
The origins and evolutionary relationships between the three main groups of amphibians are hotly debated. A molecular phylogeny based on rDNA analysis dating from 2005 suggests that salamanders and caecilians are more closely related to each other than they are to frogs, and the divergence of the three groups took place in the Paleozoic or early Mesozoic before the breakup of the ...
Traditionally, amphibians as a class are defined as all tetrapods with a larval stage, while the group that includes the common ancestors of all living amphibians (frogs, salamanders and caecilians) and all their descendants is called Lissamphibia.
There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian).
It dated back 290 million years and was hailed as a missing link, a stem batrachian close to the common ancestor of frogs and salamanders, consistent with the widely accepted hypothesis that frogs and salamanders are more closely related to each other (forming a clade called Batrachia) than they are to caecilians.
The Batrachia / b ə ˈ t r eɪ k i ə / are a clade of amphibians that includes frogs and salamanders, but not caecilians nor the extinct allocaudates. [1] The name Batrachia was first used by French zoologist Pierre André Latreille in 1800 to refer to frogs, but has more recently been defined in a phylogenetic sense as a node-based taxon that includes the last common ancestor of frogs and ...
The discovery of the new amphibian species could provide some answers to how frogs and salamanders evolved to get their special characteristics today, the authors wrote in the paper.
All extant (living) amphibians belong to the monophyletic subclass Lissamphibia, with three living orders: Anura (frogs and toads), Urodela (salamanders), and Gymnophiona . Evolved to be mostly semiaquatic , amphibians have adapted to inhabit a wide variety of habitats , with most species living in freshwater , wetland or terrestrial ecosystems ...