Amniote Updated +Created
Name origin: amnion, a pellicle that covers embryos of both eggs and also during pregnancy.
Includes:
Does not include amphibians. If you include them, you have the tetrapods.
Basal (phylogenetics) Updated +Created
When a characteristic is basal, it basically means the opposite of it being polyphyletic.
E.g. monotremes laying eggs did not evolve separately after function loss, it comes directly from reptiles.
Homeothermy Updated +Created
It is quite mind blowing that this is polyphyletic on mammals and birds, what can't parallel evolution achieve??
Figure 1. . Source. Highlights how birds should obviously be classified as reptiles.
Monotreme Updated +Created
The weirdest mammal clade: they lay fucking eggs. Only 5 known species alive as of 2020.
Eggs are basal: they simply didn't evolve out of what other reptiles do. From which we conclude that milk came before eggs stopped.
So this is the most basal subclade of mammals.
Etymology: means "single hole" in Greek, because like other reptiles it has a single hole for shit, pee and fucking: the cloaca.
Non-clade groups are evil Updated +Created
All non-clade groups are evil. All non-clade terms must be forgotten. Some notable ones:
Synapsid Updated +Created
Mammals and a bunch of extinct animals that look more like mammals than reptiles.
TODO name: Wikipedia says "being with a fused arch" but what does that mean???
Tetrapod Updated +Created
Includes:
The exact relationships between those clades is not very clear as there's a bunch of extinct species in the middle we are not sure exactly where they go exactly, some hypothesis are listed at: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tetrapod&oldid=1053601110#Temnospondyl_hypothesis_(TH)
But at least it seems rock solid that those three are actually clades.