Evolution What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters

Fish Out of Water 235 tetrapods. Panderichthys had both gills and well-developed lungs with nostrils, so it could breathe either ...

236 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! inside of the skeleton! It had an ear region adapted for hearing in water, not on land. Yet ...

FIGURE 10.8. Sketch of the skeletons of Acanthostega (top) and Ichthyostega (bottom), showing the mixture of fishlike features ( ...

238 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! which are more like those of Eusthenopteron than of tetrapods, indicating that its limbs wer ...

FIGURE 10.9. The newly discovered “fishibian” Tiktaalik. (A) Photograph of the nearly complete articulated skeleton. (B) Reconst ...

240 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! it still retains a lot of fishy characteristics, such as the tail fin, the bones covering th ...

Fish Out of Water 241 From the primitive forms like Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, the tetrapods began a great radiation of more ...

242 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! by the press because it had features of both frogs and salamanders (fig. 10.11). It had a lo ...

Fish Out of Water 243 For Further Reading So much new information has now been discovered that I highly recommend reading the bo ...

Sauria Diapsida Primitive diapsids Amniotes Reptilia Anthracosaurs Anapsid parareptiles Tuatara Dinosauria Archosauria 360 317 3 ...

11 Onto the Land and Back to the Sea: The Amniotes Innovative Eggs The most fundamental innovation is the evolution of another f ...

246 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! The embryo is also aided by multiple specialized systems. It is surrounded by a mem- brane c ...

Onto the Land and Back to the Sea: The Amniotes 247 anatomical characters will diagnose a fossil as an amniote. Once again, we h ...

248 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! As we move up the sequence of anthracosaurs, we see these features accumulating one by one i ...

Onto the Land and Back to the Sea: The Amniotes 249 They also had relatively large eyes, suggesting that they may have been nigh ...

FIGURE 11.5. Odontochelys: (A) the best of the known fossils, showing an incomplete carapace on its back (left), but a complete ...

Onto the Land and Back to the Sea: The Amniotes 251 Evolution of the Great Sea Dragons There were no real sea serpents in the Me ...

252 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! and plesiosaurs could have done so too. But ichthyosaurs are so dolphin-like in body form th ...

FIGURE 11.7. The ichthyosaurs evolved from lizard-like forms with asymmetric tails (Utatsusaurus and Chaohusaurus), primitive am ...

254 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! support a vertical tail fin. Another specimen, Grippia from the Early Triassic of Spitsberge ...