Sauropsida
| Sauropsids Temporal range: Pennsylvanian–Present, 312–0 Ma |
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| A red eared slider and a mallard; both are sauropsids | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Clade: | Amniota |
| Clade: |
Sauropsida Watson, 1956 |
| Subgroups | |
Sauropsida ("lizard faces") is a group of amniotes that includes all existing birds and reptiles as well as their fossil ancestors and other extinct relatives. Large land animals are either in this group or in its sister group, Synapsida, which includes mammals and their fossil relatives. This clade includes Parareptilia and other extinct clades. All living sauropsids are members of the sub-group Diapsida, the Parareptilia clade having died out 200 million years ago. The term originated in 1864 with Thomas Henry Huxley, who grouped birds with reptiles based on fossil evidence.
The term Sauropsida ("lizard faces") has a long history, and hails back to Thomas Henry Huxley, and his opinion that birds had risen from the dinosaurs. He based this chiefly on the fossils of Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx, that were starting to become known at the time. In the Hunterian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1863, Huxley grouped the vertebrate classes informally into mammals, sauroids, and ichthyoids (the latter containing the anamniotes), based on the gaps in physiological traits and lack of transitional fossils that seem to exist between the three groups. Early in the following year he proposed the names Sauropsida and Ichthyopsida for the two latter. Huxley did however include groups on the mammalian line (synapsids) like Dicynodon among the sauropsids. Thus, under the original definition, Sauropsida contained not only the groups usually associated with it today, but also several groups that today are known to be in the mammalian side of the tree.
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