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A notable characteristic that make a tetrapod's skull different from a fish's are the relative frontal and rear portion lengths. The fish had a long rear portion while the front was short; the orbital vacuities were thus located towards the anterior end. In the tetrapod, the front of the skull lengthened, positioning the orbits farther back on ...
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.
Bony fish can be further divided into those with lobe fins and those with ray fins. Lobe fins have the form of fleshy lobes supported by bony stalks which extend from the body. [16] Lobe fins evolved into the legs of the first tetrapod land vertebrates, so by extension an early ancestor of humans was a lobe-finned fish.
The Devonian period (419–359 Mya), also known as the Age of Fishes, saw the development of early sharks, armoured placoderms and various lobe-finned fish, including the tetrapod transitional species. Fish began evolving about 530 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion. It was during this time that the early chordates developed the ...
Fish / Vertebrates: 505 Infraphylum: Gnathostomata: Jawed fish: 460 Teleostomi: Bony fish: 420 Sarcopterygii: Lobe finned fish Superclass: Tetrapoda: Tetrapods (animals with four limbs) 395 Amniota: Amniotes (fully terrestrial tetrapods whose eggs are "equipped with an amnion") 340 Synapsida: Proto-Mammals 308 Therapsid: Limbs beneath the body ...
Amniotes are distinguished from the other living tetrapod clade — the non-amniote lissamphibians (frogs/toads, salamanders/newts and caecilians) — by the development of three extraembryonic membranes (amnion for embryonic protection, chorion for gas exchange, and allantois for metabolic waste disposal or storage), thicker and keratinized ...
Sarcopterygii (/ ˌ s ɑːr k ɒ p t ə ˈ r ɪ dʒ i. aɪ /; from Ancient Greek σάρξ (sárx) ' flesh ' and πτέρυξ (ptérux) ' wing, fin ') — sometimes considered synonymous with Crossopterygii (from Ancient Greek κροσσός (krossós) ' fringe ') — is a clade (traditionally a class or subclass) of vertebrate animals which includes a group of bony fish commonly referred to as ...
Described and extant vertebrate species are split roughly evenly but non-phylogenetically between non-tetrapod "fish" and tetrapods. The following table lists the number of described extant species for each vertebrate class as estimated in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2014.3. [57] Paraphyletic groups are shown in quotation marks.