Sentences with phrase «of tuatara»

He found that over the past 9,000 years, parts of the tuatara genetic code have changed 50 percent more quickly than those of any other vertebrate tested by the same method.

«Given this high rate of molecular evolution, the stable morphology of tuatara over tens of millions of years is remarkable,» the team writes in its report.

Not exact matches

Reptiles were defined as the set of animals that includes crocodiles, alligators, tuatara, lizards, snakes, amphisbaenians and turtles, grouped together as the class Reptilia.

They show that the iconic survivors of this lost fauna — the tuataras, moas, kiwi, acanthisittid wrens, and leiopelmatid frogs — evolved in a far more complex community that hitherto thought.»

The tuatara is a reptile, the only surviving member of Rhynchocephalia, or Sphenodontia / Sphenodontida.

Evolutionary biologist David Lambert of Griffith University in Australia and his team analyzed DNA samples taken from ancient tuatara bones and from living specimens.

During the day, large forest parrots called kaka swoop over tuatara, the only survivors of a prehistoric group of reptiles.

In the 1990s, the skull was subject to initial study in which it was identified as a cousin of a modern lizard - like reptile called a tuatara.

There is a vast diversity of additional groups of fossil vertebrates, including: (1) crocodilians and their extinct pseudosuchian kin; (2) marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, placodonts, and the like; (3) lepidosaurs (snakes, lizards, mosasaurs, tuataras, and their extinct relatives); (4) other fossil reptiles; (5) the extinct synapsid ancestors and relatives of mammals; and (6) amphibian - grade animals such as lepospondyls, temnospondyls, and seymouriamorphs (Benton 2014).

Though many species — such as the moa, a giant flightless bird, and the Haast's eagle, with its impressive 10 - foot wing span — have gone extinct since European settlers arrived, countless others remain, such as the kakapo, the world's heaviest parrot (which is also flightless) and the tuatara, a reptile that was a contemporary of the dinosaurs and is now the last of its kind.