Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Is Lissamphibia Paraphyletic?

(cladogram from here)

If Eocaecilia nests within Lepospondyli...that would mean that Caecilians are not closely related to salamanders and frogs at all.

How accepted (or not) is this?

3 comments:

Mike said...

After Gerobatrachus description was published, David Marjanovic and Michel Laurin argued that Lissamphibia are actually monophyletic (and that they are all lepospondyls). They didn't write too much about Gerobatrachus itself, but they doubted that it actually had "os basale commune". See:

http://dpc.uba.uva.nl/ctz/vol77/nr03/art02

Zach said...

There's a good paper in that IUP "Transitional Forms in the Fossil Record" book about this. That paper (I forget the authors) suggest that frogs and salamanders are monophyletic, but cecaelians are related to microsaurs. I thought it was a fine paper, but my knowledge of amphibians is pretty much zilch.

Will Baird said...

Interesting there, Mike.

I'm mulling over their argument, but I got the distinct impression from reading the gerobatrachus paper that it was pretty solidly a temnospondyl though.

I guess I need to read and ponder some more.

And learn a lot more. lol.