Sentences with phrase «early tetrapods»
"Early tetrapods" refers to the first group of animals that evolved from fish and became four-legged creatures, such as amphibians. They mark an important step in the transition from water to land. Full definition
A 2012 reconstruction of early tetrapod Ichthyostega suggests that it couldn't bend side - to - side like lizards do as they walk.
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However, the most of basal bones located in the anterior side (i.e. the thumb side in the human limb) were lost in early tetrapods, and only the most posterior bone remained as the «humerus (i.e. the upper arm of humans).»
Moving around on land required significantly more huffing and puffing — and oxygen — than swimming for early tetrapods.
Mudskipper fish and tiger salamanders have similar characteristics to early tetrapod ancestors.
The first four - legged, land - living creatures — known as early tetrapods — evolved from fish, following the transformation of fins into limbs.
Unfortunately, the available fossils of tetrapodlike fish such as Tiktaalik and early tetrapods carry no evidence of how they reproduced.
The shoulders and pelvis of early tetrapods expanded and strengthened, allowing for load - bearing on land.
«All of them are a little weird,» says Cambridge University professor emeritus Jennifer Clack, the grand dame of early tetrapod research.
Scientists use the tiger salamander to investigate the stresses that early tetrapods experienced as they moved from water to land.
The discovery suggests that many of the developments necessary for the transition from water to land could have occurred long before early tetrapods, such as Tiktaalik, took their first steps on shore.
Both abilities were previously thought to originate in early tetrapods, the limbed original land - dwellers that appeared later than the lungfish's ancestors.
The researchers wanted to test what factors could have driven diversity in skeletal design in the evolution of early tetrapods.
These rainforests flourished because of the warm humid climate, providing an ideal habitat for early tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs), allowing them to diversify into a variety of species.
Research conducted by Sandy Kawano and Richard Blob at Clemson University compared terrestrial locomotion in tiger salamanders and mudskipper fish, which have similar characteristics to early tetrapod ancestors.
Acanthostega (365 million years ago): Like its rough contemporary Ichthyostega, another early tetrapod, this creature had evolved digits — lots of them, as many as eight per limb.
In the early tetrapod hotspot of southern Scotland, for example, researchers discovered that tetrapods apparently moved to land during a wetter period: Many of the tetrapod fossils turning up there have been found in what were seasonal floodplains.
An early tetrapod is shown at the top of the image.
Those prints were made by the earliest tetrapod (four - legged) land vertebrate ever found.
Despite this being a catastrophic event for plants, it has been unclear how this affected the early tetrapod community.
Emma Dunne, from the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: «This is the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken on early tetrapod evolution, and uses many newly developed techniques for estimating diversity patterns of species from fossil records, allowing us greater insights into how early tetrapods responded to the changes in their environment.»
The team compared the fish's bones and head structure to fossils of a more primitive fish and an early tetrapod.
The early tetrapods (from the Ancient Greek word meaning «four - footed») were the first vertebrates to tread terra firma, developing lungs to capture atmospheric oxygen and turning fins into legs, but with a life cycle that was still closely tied to aquatic environments.
Salamanders are particularly good organisms for studying how locomotion onto land evolved, as their anatomy and ecology is similar to the earliest tetrapods.
The findings are reported by researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona) and their collaborators in the journal eLife and give new insight into how fish evolved to live on land in the form of early tetrapods.
Now, researchers at Tokyo Tech and CRG, together with scientists across Japan and Spain, have revealed how genetic alterations governing the patterning of skeletal structures in fins may have led to the evolution of limbs and the rise of early tetrapods.
New information about the elusive life history of early tetrapods - the earliest four - limbed vertebrates - is presented in a study published online in Nature this week.
It also suggests that fossil tracks long believed to be the work of early tetrapods could have been produced instead by lobe - finned ancestors of the lungfish.
«It's tempting to attribute alternating impressions to something like the footfalls of an early tetrapod with digits, and yet here we've got good evidence that living lungfish can leave similar sequences of similar gait,» said Coates, PhD, professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.
This family of loaches, sometimes called sting - loaches, is found in Eurasia and Morocco and has about 28 genera with about 236 species (Berra The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe - finned fishes.
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe - finned fishes.