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Amphibia: Disparity and Diversification of Early Tetrapods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

Michael A. Fracasso
Michael A. Fracasso*
Affiliation:
Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, 79 Elm Street, Hartford, Connecticut 06106 and Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269
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Extract

Fossils conventionally classified as amphibians comprise a diverse, paraphyletic assemblage of roughly 15 distinctive lineages (=clades; Figure 1) of non–amniote tetrapods whose phylogenetic interrelationships continue to defy resolution (Carroll, 1992; Figure 2). The historical accumulation of morphological data, new paleontological discoveries, better understanding of characters and transformation series, and refinement of rigorous cladistic analytical methodology have stimulated a resurgence of interest in the phylogenetics of early tetrapods (Bolt, 1991; Bolt and Lombard, 1991; Clack, 1988, 1991; Duellman, 1988; Gauthier et al., 1988b; Lombard and Bolt, 1988; Milner, 1988, 1990, 1993; Panchen, 1991; Panchen and Smithson, 1987, 1988; Smithson, 1985; Trueb and Cloutier, 1991a, 1991b). However, most investigations have done little more than substantiate the distinctiveness of the major non–amniote tetrapod clades and clarify within–clade relationships. Differences in parsimony between alternative phylogenies proposed for the early lineages are generally too minor to consider any as strongly corroborated (Carroll, 1990, 1992; e.g. Panchen and Smithson, 1988).

Type
Research Article
Information
Short Courses in Paleontology , Volume 7: Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution , 1994 , pp. 108 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Paleontological Society 

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