#parareptiles

[infinitemachine]

Permian Russian roulette by tuomaskoivurinne

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

should I make a blog dedicated to weird permian and triassic reptiles (aka stuff that does not continue on into the jurassic) or nah it will mostly be parareptile propaganda bc I love those little freaks but I want to also talk about like, captorhinids, etc.

yes

no

focus on your thesis you fool the birds need you to research them

meig you have too many projects already. put down the new blog. put it down.

make someone else do it (but who?)

Voting ended onJul 4, 2023

side note, "freak" "weirdo" and other similar terms are positively connoted on my blogs. because. being weird is good, actually.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

What is your favorite non-dinosaur group of animals? Also, what is your favorite non-animal form of life?

Parareptiles! Those little weirdos are some of my favourites. I’ve almost made a parareptile blog five times.

And I’m a sucker for Archaeans. Love those weird not-bacteria. Extremophiles? Asgard? Eukaryote ancestors? Defy categorisation? That’s my shit right there

[mrsjdavis]

Hahaha look at this silly boi

Scutosaurus - Wikipedia

[immoren]

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

American Museum of Natural History, Part 24: Awkward Outdated Grouping

So back in the day, we thought that turtles - which have secondarily derived “anapsid” (ie, no temporal fenestrae) skulls, evolved from what we now know to be Parareptiles - one of the two first divisions of Sauropsida. So:

Basically, some early tetrapods evolved the amniotic egg so they could reproduce on land instead of the water. Hooray!

This group then divided into two: Synapsids, which are all amniotes more closely related to modern mammals than to modern birds, and Sauropsids, which are the reverse. Synapsids would later evolve into mammals and all modern synapsids are mammals. 

Sauropsids had two early branches: Parareptiles, which were “Anapsids,” and Eureptiles, which were also Anapsids but would eventually evolve into Diapsids - having two temporal fenestrae (synapsids have one; this is grossly oversimplified). 

So, because turtles were anapsids, we thought they evolved from Parareptiles. 

However, genetic evidence has revealed that they are actually more closely related to modern Archosaurs (birds and crocodilians) than they are to lizards and snakes (lepidosaurs) which, along with other evidence, implies that they are actually diapsids that lost their temporal fenestrae, and not parareptiles at all 

Anyway tl;dr the turtles were grouped with parareptiles because of outdated cladistics. So here are some good turts and some good weird early reptiles.