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Air-breathing arthropods evolved and invaded the land where they provided food for the carnivorous amphibians that began to adapt to the terrestrial environment. There were no other tetrapods on the land and the amphibians were at the top of the food chain, with some occupying ecological positions currently held by crocodiles.
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
The ancestors of true amniotes, such as Casineria kiddi, which lived about 340 million years ago, evolved from amphibian reptiliomorphs and resembled small lizards. At the late Devonian mass extinction (360 million years ago), all known tetrapods were essentially aquatic and fish-like.
They evolved from lobe-finned fish of the clade Sarcopterygii, appearing in coastal water in the middle Devonian, and giving rise to the first amphibians. [ 59 ] The group of lobe-finned fishes that were the ancestors of the tetrapod are grouped together as the Rhipidistia , [ 60 ] and the first tetrapods evolved from these fish over the ...
The first fully terrestrial vertebrates were reptilian amniotes — their eggs had internal membranes that allowed the developing embryo to breathe but kept water in. This allowed amniotes to lay eggs on dry land, while amphibians generally need to lay their eggs in water (a few amphibians, such as the common Suriname toad, have evolved other ways of getting around this limitation).
The oldest known animal that may have been an amniote, a reptile rather than an amphibian, is Casineria [3] [4] (though it has also been argued to be a temnospondyl amphibian). [5] A series of footprints from the fossil strata of Nova Scotia, dated to 315 million years, show typical reptilian toes and imprints of scales. [6]
The group did not touch the frog. ... The authors discovered the amphibian in June 2023 and did not collect it, so neither the cause of the phenomenon nor the fate of the frog is known ...
The fins evolved into the legs of the first tetrapod land vertebrates, amphibians. They also possess two dorsal fins with separate bases, as opposed to the single dorsal fin of ray-finned fish. The braincase of lobe-finned fish primitively has a hinge line, but this is lost in tetrapods and lungfish.