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Re: Dimetrodon



At 08:36 AM 5/5/96 -0400, Mark Sumner wrote:
>Hmm.  Perhaps you should insert the word "modern" in here, as in
>"more closely related to modern mammals than to modern reptiles."
>
>As a "mammal-like reptile," sphenacodonts are still reptiles,
>and so about as closely related to reptiles as you can get. <g>

   That's interesting.  I thought Pelycosaurs and their kin were no longer
considered reptiles and that the term "mammal like reptile" had been dropped.

   Since the subject has come up and the moderator would not post it to
sci.bio.evolution:

   Did Dimetrodon have scales?  I read somewhere the phrase "paleontologists
now doubt that" pelycosaurs had scales.  Yet, in a 1987 comparative anatomy
book I have, it describes mammals as having true scales (armadillos, rats,
beavers, etc.)  Were these scales acquired later?  Are they the result of
convergent evolution?  Or did Dimetrodon and its kin have scales in direct
contradiction of what I wrote in the second sentence?

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