David Marjanović

Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity | MFN · Science Programme Evolution and Geoprocesses

The membership, phylogeny and external relationships of Amniota quickly achieved "textbook wisdom" status in the mid-1990s, but were all called into question by phylogenetic analyses in the last few years. However, all these analyses and all their predecessors have either focused on early limbed vertebrates and barely extended into Amniota, or focu...

The description of the small Late Triassic temnospondyl Chinlestegophis ushered in a potentially radically new understanding of the origins of the extant amphibian clades. Together with the fragmentary Rileymillerus , Chinlestegophis was argued to link extant caecilians to Permo-Triassic stereospondyl temnospondyls rather than to frogs and salamand...

Abstract: The description of the small Late Triassic temnospondyl Chinlestegophis ushered in a potentially radically new understanding of the origins of the extant amphibian clades. Together with the fragmentary Rileymillerus, Chinlestegophis was argued to link extant caecilians to Permo-Triassic stereospondyl temnospondyls rather than to frogs and...

The description of the small Late Triassic temnospondyl Chinlestegophis ushered in a potentially radically new understanding of the origins of the extant amphibian clades. Together with the fragmentary Rileymillerus, Chinlestegophis was argued to link the extant caecilians to the Permo-Triassic stereospondyl temnospondyls rather than to frogs and s...

Recent studies have shown that the Triassic stem-frog Triadobatrachus Kuhn, 1962 lacked the ability to jump, but nonetheless had the forelimb strength to withstand the impact of landing from a jump. We propose a hypothesis to resolve this pseudoparadox: the strengthened forelimbs are former adaptations to forelimb-based digging that later made jump...

The origin of extant amphibians has been studied using several sources of data and methods, including phylogenetic analyses of morphological data, molecular dating, stratigraphic data, and integration of ossification sequence data, but a consensus about their affnities with other Paleozoic tetrapods has failed to emerge. We have compiled five datas...

Recent studies have shown that the Triassic stem-frog Triadobatrachus lacked the ability to jump off, but nonetheless had the forelimb strength to withstand the impact of landing from a jump. We propose a hypothesis to resolve this pseudoparadox: the strengthened forelimbs are former adaptations to forelimb-based digging that later made jumping pos...

Molecular divergence dating has the potential to overcome the incompleteness of the fossil record in inferring when cladogenetic events (splits, divergences) happened, but needs to be calibrated by the fossil record. Ideally but unrealistically, this would require practitioners to be specialists in molecular evolution, in the phylogeny and the foss...

Identical to the full submission, including the updated figure, to the second round of peer review.

This version is identical to the first revision being peer-reviewed at Frontiers in Genetics. Because a few calibration dates have changed, the analysis has to be repeated; this is ongoing and will change the parts of the text highlighted in yellow (and the figure, which is not included in this version), but most likely not by much.

The page where the original version of this article is posted unfortunately contained an error. In that page, the supplementary material is not currently included along with the article and this problem has been corrected with this erratum.

'Microsaurs' are traditionally considered to be lepospondyl non-amniotes, but recent analyses have recovered a subset of 'microsaurs', the fossorially adapted Recumbirostra, within Amniota. This novel conclusion highlights the need for additional work to evaluate these competing hypotheses with the aim of refining the phylogenetic position of 'micr...

Molecular divergence dating has the potential to overcome the incompleteness of the fossil record in inferring when cladogenetic events (splits, divergences) happened, but needs to be calibrated by the fossil record. Ideally but unrealistically, this would require practitioners to be specialists in molecular evolution, in the phylogeny and the foss...

Molecular divergence dating has the potential to overcome the incompleteness of the fossil record in inferring when cladogenetic events (splits, divergences) happened, but needs to be calibrated by the fossil record. Ideally but unrealistically, this would require practitioners to be specialists in molecular evolution, in the phylogeny and the foss...

The origin of extant amphibians has been studied using several sources of data and methods, including phylogenetic analyses of morphological data, molecular dating, stratigraphic data, and integration of ossification sequence data, but a consensus about their affinities with other Paleozoic tetrapods has failed to emerge. We have compiled five data...

The origin of extant amphibians has been studied using several sources of data and methods, including phylogenetic analyses of morphological data, molecular dating, stratigraphic data, and integration of ossification sequence data, but a consensus about their affinities with Paleozoic tetrapods has failed to emerge. We have compiled five datasets t...

Second version, incorporating the comments from the first round of peer review. This includes analyses of appendicular characters, for which two "lepospondyls" and additional temnospondyls can be scored.

On each sheet, the matrix is reproduced in cells B1–JR103, the presence of a change of the kind in question marked by “1” while all other cells remain empty; the matrix is surrounded by sums and ranked lists with a few comments. On the sheet “green”, the changes caused by the removal of all postcranial scores from Rhynchonkos are not counted. See t...

NEXUS file (plain text) containing our revised data matrix, a tree from Analysis EB in two formats (one with the posterior probabilities as node labels), and the settings used for this analysis. The stepmatrix characters (32 and 134 in both Appendices and Data S3) are split into two or three characters each, as explained in the text and App. S1. Ex...

The line numbers are the numbers of the characters (1–277). Column A shows the minimum of necessary steps per character (its number of states minus one); column B shows the steps actually found in R1 or R4 on the trees included in Data S3; column C is the difference between A and B, sorted from lowest to highest in column E, counted in columns G an...

NEXUS file (plain text) containing our revised data matrix, one MPT from each of Analyses R1–R6 and the settings used for these analyses. Executing the file in PAUP* performs the statistical comparisons (Kishino-Hasegawa test, Templeton test, winning-sites test) of these trees and then repeats Analyses R1–R6 in this order. In addition, the bootstra...

On the sheet “Data”, the OTUs are listed such that the line numbers are the same as the numbers the OTUs have in the matrix; OTUs that cannot be measured for any of the parameters are represented by blank lines. Calculations are underlain in yellow or blue. The raw measurements, in cm, will mostly be difficult to reproduce: they were taken from ill...

NEXUS file (plain text) containing the original data matrix of RC07, one MPT from each of Analyses O1, O2 and O3, as well as the settings for these analyses. Executing the file in PAUP* performs the statistical comparisons (Kishino-Hasegawa test, Templeton test, winning-sites test) of these trees and then repeats Analyses O1–O3 in this order. In ad...

The largest published phylogenetic analysis of early limbed vertebrates (Ruta M, Coates MI. 2007. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5:69–122) recovered, for example, Seymouriamorpha, Diadectomorpha and (in some trees) Caudata as paraphyletic and found the “temnospondyl hypothesis” on the origin of Lissamphibia (TH) to be more parsimonious than th...

The controversial origin of extant amphibians has been studied using several sources of data and methods, including phylogenetic analyses of morphological data, molecular dating, stratigraphic data, and comparisons of ossification sequences. A consensus has failed to emerge, perhaps because the diversity of methods used hampers comparisons. We have...

The largest published phylogenetic analysis of early limbed vertebrates (Ruta M, Coates MI. 2007. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5:69–122) recovered e.g. Seymouriamorpha, Diadectomorpha and (in some trees) Caudata as paraphyletic and found the “temnospondyl hypothesis” on the origin of Lissamphibia (TH) to be more parsimonious than the “leposp...

The largest published data matrix for phylogenetic analysis of Paleozoic limbed vertebrates (Ruta M, Coates MI. 2007. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5:69–122) supported several hypotheses that are, to varying degrees, controversial; e.g., it recovered Seymouriamorpha, Diadectomorpha and (in some trees) Caudata as paraphyletic and found the “te...

The largest published morphological data matrix for analysis of the phylogeny of Paleozoic limbed vertebrates (Ruta M, Coates MI. 2007. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5:69–122) has supported a number of phylogenetic hypotheses that are, to varying degrees, controversial; for example, it has recovered Seymouriamorpha, Diadectomorpha and (in som...

We describe an Oligocene newt specimen from western Germany that has gone practically unnoticed in the literature despite having been housed in the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) for a century. It is referable to the coeval Chelotriton, but is unusually peramorphic; for many characters it is more peramorphic than all other caudates or even all othe...

Smaller pdf of the same paper; same figure quality as far as I can see.

We present an update of our time-calibrated supertree of extant and extinct lissamphibians (Marjanović D, Laurin M. 2007. Fossils, molecules, divergence times, and the origin of lissamphibians. Syst Biol 56(3):369–388) and of the divergence dates that can be inferred from it. The present version contains 319 extinct species or possible species of l...

The origins of the extant amphibians (frogs, salamanders, caecilians) remain controversial after over a century of debate. Three groups of hypotheses persist in the current literature: the “temnospondyl hypothesis” (TH) which roots Lissamphibia Haeckel, 1866 (the smallest clade composed of the extant amphibians) within the Paleozoic temnospondyls,...

Ever since Eldredge and Gould proposed their model of punctuated equilibria, evolutionary biologists have debated how often this model is the best description of nature and how important it is compared to the more gradual models of evolution expected from natural selection and the neo-Darwinian paradigm. Recently, Cubo proposed a method to test whe...

["Short communication", no abstract. The conclusions follow:] The result of our study that Apsisaurus witteri is a varanopid synapsid, not an eosuchian diapsid, has significant implications to our understanding of both synapsid and diapsid evolution. First, this finding increases the known diversity of varanopid synapsids even further. Even though...

2008. Assessing confidence intervals for stratigraphic ranges of higher taxa: The case of Lissamphibia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 53 (3): 413–432. To evaluate stratigraphic evidence for the time of origin of the clade of extant amphibians (Lissamphibia), we attempt to establish a confidence interval on the lower bound of the stratigraphic range...

[No abstract. First paragraph:] Anderson (2008) recently reviewed the controversial topic of extant amphibian origins, on which three (groups of) hypotheses exist at the moment. Anderson favors the ‘‘polyphyly hypothesis’’ (PH), which considers the extant amphibians to be polyphyletic with respect to many Paleozoic limbed vertebrates and was most r...

The origin of frogs, salamanders and caecilians is controversial. McGowan published an original hypothesis on lissamphibian origins in 2002 (McGowan, 2002, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 135: 1-32), stating that Gymnophiona was nested inside the 'microsaurian' lepospondyls, this clade was the sister-group of a caudate-salientian-albaner...

A review of the paleontological literature shows that the early dates of appearance of Lissamphibia recently inferred from molecular data do not favor an origin of extant amphibians from temnospondyls, contrary to recent claims. A supertree is assembled using new Mesquite modules that allow extinct taxa to be incorporated into a time-calibrated phy...