Talk:Seymouria

Screenshot

i would like to request a screen shot of walking with monsters that contains an image of seymouria. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.230.72.211 (talk • contribs) 16:19, 20 June 2006 61.230.72.211

May not be possible

A Screenshot may not be possible. The show is under copy right, and it would be illegal obtain a screenshot, much less post it here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.10.60.147 (talk • contribs) 16:46, 5 August 2006 64.10.60.147

Reptile, Amphibian, Other?

"Seymouria was a reptile-like tetrapod ... with many reptilian features ... it was first thought to be a primitive reptile. ... in the television series Walking with Monsters ... It was erroneously called an amphibian."

Hmm, clicking on Reptiliomorpha in the taxobox ... "Reptiliomorpha is a name given ... to reptile-like tetrapods ... Michael Benton (2000, 2004) mades it the sister-clade to Batrachomorpha. ... Reptiliomorpha is given the rank of superorder and only includes reptile-like amphibians [Systema Naturae 2000]. More recently Reptiliomorpha has been adopted as the term for the largest clade that includes - according to the technical definitions of the phylocode which only refers to species or genus level organisms - Homo sapiens but not Ascaphus truei (a primitive frog)"

So: Reptiliomorphs are amphibians? Reptiles? Or is this obsolete Linneaean thinking?
Could somebody please add a few words to Seymouria to clarify this? Thanks. -- Writtenonsand 18:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Amphibian is being used two different ways, which is causing the confusion. Traditionally, Class Amphibia included the entire paraphyletic grade from Ichthyostega to reptiles. Most modern scientists only use the name Amphibia to refer to the group contaning the modern forms, i.e. frogs, salamanders, etc, which also might include temnospondyls like Eryops, etc. This leaves all the other traditional amphibians outside a class, but a lot of people still refer to them as "amphibians" informally. I'd change the phrasing on Reptiliomorpha to "Includes reptile-like tetrapods" to clear this up. Dinoguy2 01:49, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Some relevant sources:
Carroll, Robert 2009. The rise of amphibia. p163 (left-hand column): "... the discovery of larval stages... demonstrated conclusively that the seymouriamorphs were not biologically amniotes".
Clack, Jennifer 2012. Gaining ground, 2nd ed. Seymouriamorphs p353/6. p356: "Seymouriamorphs were definitely not amniotes themselves".
The page also lacks the critical discovery of larval stages in closely related seymouriamorphs, which is referenced in both the above textbooks. The key name to look for is Klembara. I regret to say I have not read the original papers yet... Macdonald-ross (talk) 17:55, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Note though that the presence of larval stages doesn't make it an amphibian in all definitions of that term. Typologically, it does. Phylogenetically, it's not unless it's a member of the clade (frogs+salamandars), so it would be a stem-amniote (some of which must have had larval stages as the ancestral state). Dinoguy2 (talk) 13:19, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi all,

Dinoguy2 is mostly correct in his analysis. Two minor points require a small correction.

First, there are actually three concepts of "Amphibia" in the literature. In addition to the two meanings explained above, many authors view that term as a synonym of Lissamphibia. But I prefer to view Lissamphibia as the amphibian crown and Amphibia as the total group. These are the name/definitions combinations that I got to be established under the PhyloCode (others were pushing for Amphibia = Lissamphibia, with the latter treated as a junior synonym.

Second, under the PhyloCode, Reptiliomorpha is not an established name. I wanted to use it, but even Phil Cantino (the botanist who is a co-author of the PhyloCode) thought that it was a very bad (misleading) name because the taxon should be delimited as the amniote total group, not the reptile one (a valid point, though the paraphyletic Reptilia stems from the same last common ancestor as Amniota), so we ended up using Pan-Amniota instead.

Finally, also note that while there is a very long tradition (over a century) of considering seymouriamorphs to be pan-amniotes (reptiliomorphs), my doctoral thesis (defended in 1994 and subsequently published as several papers) showed that this is probably not the case; all my data matrices, especially those done mostly by David Marjanovic, support a stem-tetrapod position of seymouriamorphs. That still represents a minority point of view, but I have never seen evidence that made me doubt that this minority point of view is correct. So, both alternatives should be mentioned in any serious discussion of the issue (and that is often the case in the literature, although my preferred hypothesis is typically evoked only briefly as the alternative).

Best wishes, Michel Laurin (talk) 06:22, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Zoology

What is seymouria 2402:8100:2080:18FE:0:0:772:8909 (talk) 17:34, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

The article answers that for you. FunkMonk (talk) 07:05, 28 April 2022 (UTC)