3

In the Phylogeny of humans and reptiles, what is/are some of the most recent common ancestors?

enter image description here

stevec
  • 217
  • 1
  • 11
  • related: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/82206/why-arent-mammals-and-reptiles-considered-amphibians?r=SearchResults&s=14|11.8981, https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/47957/why-are-turtles-classified-as-reptiles-and-not-amphibians/47968?r=SearchResults&s=15|11.3526#47968 – Maximilian Press Jun 25 '21 at 15:41

1 Answers1

7

I think that you are looking for the amniote common ancestor.

Amniotes are the group of organisms that have an amnion, a specific membrane around the egg, among other features. This includes reptiles, mammals, etc. but excludes amphibians and fish as indicated in your tree.

Wikipedia says:

The first amniotes, referred to as "basal amniotes", resembled small lizards and evolved from the amphibian reptiliomorphs about 312 million years ago,[7] in the Carboniferous geologic period. Amniotes spread around Earth's land and became the dominant land vertebrates.[7] They soon diverged into synapsids and sauropsids, which persist today. The oldest known fossil synapsid is Protoclepsydrops from about 312 million years ago,[7] while the oldest known sauropsid is probably Paleothyris, in the order Captorhinida, from the Middle Pennsylvanian epoch (c. 306–312 million years ago).

That citation 7 points to this paper, which used paleontological data to assign time estimates to various diversification events inferred from molecular phylogenies; this allowed them to approximately estimate the time of emergence of amniotes from the amphibian clade.

Maximilian Press
  • 10,037
  • 15
  • 57