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Re: Chelonians and Small et al's Archosauromorph



At 10:23 PM 03/10/02 -0700, Rob Gay wrote:
> Could it be the archosauromorph ancestor of the
 turtles!<
I somehow doubt it, but who knows. I thought turtles were thought to have a
strong ancestory to some Permian beasts, closer to mammals, who had migrated
the scapula into the ribcage.

No, no. The only animals other than turtles known to have done this are some of the shelled placodonts like Henodus. You are thinking of parareptiles (anapsids, more or less) like pareiasaurs and procolophonids, which belong to a sister group to Eureptiles like lizards and archosaurs but are no closer to the mammalian/synapsid line than dinosaurs are. The big controversy in turtle origins is whether turtles arose from within the parareptile clade (as a lot of anatomical evidence suggests) or the eureptile clade (s DNA analysis suggests, though of course we have no parareptile DNA). According to one of the experts on this, Dr Robert Reisz, we simply do not have enough evidence to resolve this right now (or so he told me).



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Ronald I. Orenstein Phone: (905) 820-7886
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