Osteolepiformes, also known as Osteolepidida, is a group of
prehistoric lobe-finned fishes which first appeared during the
Devonian period
Period may refer to:
Common uses
* Era, a length or span of time
* Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Period (music), a concept in musical composition
* Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...
. The
order contains the families
Canowindridae,
Megalichthyidae,
Osteolepididae and
Tristichopteridae
Tristichopterids (Tristichopteridae) were a diverse and successful group of tetrapodomorph fishes living throughout the Middle and Late Devonian. They first appeared in the Eifelian stage of the Middle Devonian. Within the group sizes ranged fro ...
. The order is generally considered to be
paraphyletic because the characters that define it are mainly attributes of
stem tetrapodomorphs.
Below is a
cladogram
A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to ...
showing the paraphyly of Osteolepiformes compiled and modified from Ahlberg and Johanson (1998).
[ See also Swartz (2012).]
References
External links
Tree of Life
Tetrapodomorphs
Prehistoric fish orders
Paraphyletic groups
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