Re: News item: temnospondyl body impressions

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 10/30/07, Allen Hazen <allenph@unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> For those NOT at the GSA meetings in Denver where this was announced:
> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ancient-Amphibians.html?_r=1&oref=slog
> in
>
> Temnospondyls apparently had smooth, unarmored, skin.  Who knows: the day
> may come when (everyone long since having absorbed the lessons of cladistics
> and gotten bored with its pedantry) we'll start calling them "amphibians"
> again.  Meanwhile, it's reassuring to hear that some stem-group amphibians
> seem to have shared a derived soft-tissue condition with the crown group.

I'm well outside my area of expertise here, but isn't soft tissue a
characteristic of _Batrachia_ rather than _Amphibia_? Would that
suggest that temnospondyls (or these ones, at least) are
stem-batrachians (and hence perfectly good amphibians)?

-- 
Mike Keesey