Vertebrate paleontology

The Devonian period (419 to 359 Ma) saw primitive air-breathing fish to develop limbs allowing them to walk on land, thus becoming the first terrestrial vertebrates, the stegocephalians.

[2] The K-Pg mass extinction wiped out many vertebrate clades, including the pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and nearly all dinosaurs, leaving many ecological niches open.

While therian mammals had already evolved in the Late Jurassic, they would rise to prominence in the Paleogene following the mass extinction and remain to this day, although squamates and birds still lead in diversity.

[3] Thomas Jefferson is credited with initiating the science of vertebrate paleontology in the United States with the reading of a paper to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1797.

[4][5][6] Jefferson corresponded with Cuvier, including sending him a shipment of highly desirable bones of the American mastodon and the woolly mammoth.

An updated work that largely carried on the tradition from Romer, and by many considered definitive book on the subject was written by Robert L. Carroll of McGill University, the 1988 text Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution.

[12] Kingdom Animalia The oVert (openVertebrate) Thematic Collection Network (TCN) is a project that aims to generate and distribute high-resolution digital three-dimensional data for internal anatomy across vertebrate diversity.

This collection of digital imagery and three-dimensional volumes will be open for exploration, download, and use to address questions related to the discovery of new species, documenting patterns of anatomical diversity and growth, and testing hypotheses of function and evolution.