Anthracosauria

Anthracosaurus from the late Carboniferous in a live reconstruction

• Europe, North America

The Anthracosauria are an extinct group of terrestrial vertebrates ( Tetrapoda ), which mainly aquatic but also terrestrial lived in the marshes of Europe and North America during the late Paleozoic. They subsisted probably mainly of fish.

Features

They were elongate animals which were about one to two meters long. Her legs were slender, the tail formed in adaptation to their way of life as a rudder tail. The skull was massive and was strong teeth, but had a weakness zone between the skull roof and cheek that possibly allowed a skull movement during Zubeißens. Skull roof and braincase were connected. The palate was largely closed and filled with powerful fangs and many denticles. An indentation at the posterior margin of the cheek may be wearing a eardrum. The vortex consisted of two equal-sized vertebrae, Pleurocentra and Intercentra. Both had the form of large heavily ossified discs. The animals had five toes ( Phalangenformel 2-3-4-5-3 ).

System

The Anthracosauria are close to the origin of amniotes and be reunited with the reptiles in the taxon Reptiliomorpha. They are now considered paraphyletic. Within the Anthracosauria two Untertaxa be distinguished, the Embolomeri living aquatic and Gephyrostegida who were more likely to be country dweller. The Gephyrostegida resembled the first reptiles. They were relatively small with relatively long limbs and never had more than 24 trunk vertebrae, the Embolomeri had up to 40

Some scholars use the term Anthracosauria completely different and define it as amniotes and all other extinct terrestrial vertebrates that are the amniotes kinship closer than the amphibians.