gady-i-płazy: Amniote

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Amniotes are tetrapod vertebrate animals belonging to the clade Amniota, a large group that comprises the vast majority of living terrestrial and semiaquatic vertebrates. Amniotes evolved from amphibious stem tetrapod ancestors during the Carboniferous period. Amniota is defined as the smallest crown clade (the group including all descendants of the last common ancestor) containing humans, the Greek tortoise, and the Nile crocodile. Amniotes represent a crucial evolutionary step in vertebrate history, marking the transition from aquatic to fully terrestrial life. Amniotes are distinguished from the other living tetrapod clade — the non-amniote lissamphibians (frogs/toads, salamanders/newts…

Evidence: 59 • authority: 72

Reptiliomorpha (meaning reptile-shaped; in PhyloCode known as Pan-Amniota) is a clade containing the amniotes and those tetrapods that share a more recent common ancestor with amniotes than with living amphibians (lissamphibians). It was defined by Michel Laurin (2001) and Vallin and Laurin (2004) as the largest clade that includes Homo sapiens, but not Ascaphus truei (tailed frog). Laurin and Reisz (2020) defined Pan-Amniota as the largest total clade containing Homo sapiens, but not Pipa pipa, Caecilia tentaculata, and Siren lacertina. The informal variant of the name, "reptiliomorphs", is also occasionally used to refer to stem-amniotes, i.e. a grade of reptile-like tetrapods that are mo…

Evidence: 53 • authority: 72

Reptiles, as commonly defined, are tetrapod vertebrate animals with an ectothermic metabolism and amniotic development. Reptiles traditionally comprise four orders: Testudines (turtles), Crocodilia (crocodiles, alligators and gharials), Squamata (lizards and snakes) and Rhynchocephalia (tuatara), with about 12,000 extant species listed in the Reptile Database. The study of the traditional reptile orders, customarily in combination with the study of modern amphibians, is called herpetology. Reptiles have been subject to several conflicting taxonomic definitions. In classical evolutionary taxonomy, reptiles are gathered together under the class Reptilia ( rep-TIL-ee-ə), which corresponds to c…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 92

An Orthologics Study of the Notch Signaling Pathway.. The Notch signaling pathway plays a major role in embryological development and in the ongoing life processes of many animals. Its role is to provide cell-to-cell communication in which a Sender cell, bearing membrane-embedded ligands, instructs a Receiver cell, bearing membrane-embedded receptors, to adopt one of two available fates. Elucidating the evolution of this pathway is the topic of this paper, which uses an orthologs approach, providing a comprehensive basis for the study. Using BLAST searches, orthologs were identified for all the 49 components of the Notch signaling pathway. The historical time course of integration of these…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 72

Phylogenetic nomenclature (sometimes called cladistic nomenclature) is a method of nomenclature for taxa in biology that uses phylogenetic definitions for taxon names. Phylogenetic nomenclature assigns names to clades, groups consisting solely of an ancestor and all its descendants. This contrasts with the traditional method, by which taxon names are defined by a type, which can be a specimen or a taxon of lower rank, and a description in words. Phylogenetic nomenclature is regulated currently by the International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature (PhyloCode).

Evidence: 36 • authority: 92

Mandibular form and function is more disparate in amniotes than in non-amniote tetrapods from the late Palaeozoic.. Terrestrial tetrapods originated during the Middle Devonian, and the group rapidly diversified throughout the subsequent Carboniferous and Permian periods. Feeding in air rather than water is expected to require changes to tetrapod mandibular form and function. Previous biomechanical studies on jaw evolution, however, found that the increase in functional disparity lagged behind terrestrialisation by approximately 70 Myr, coinciding with the origin of amniotes and herbivory. We expand on a previous dataset composed primarily of non-amniote tetrapods to identify the drivers of…