Claire Browning

1 month ago | biorxiv.org | Xavier A. Jenkins |Roger Benson |David Ford |Claire Browning

AbstractLiving reptiles include more than 20,000 species with disparate ecologies. Direct anatomical evidence from Neodiapsida, which includes the reptile crown-group Sauria and its closest extinct relatives, shows that this diversity originates from a single common ancestor that lived some 257 million years ago in the Paleozoic. However, the evolutionary assembly of crown reptile traits is poorly understood due to the lack of anatomically close relatives of Neodiapsida.