Amniotes are the only fully terrestrial land vertebrates on earth and comprise such diverse groups as mammals, birds, and modern reptiles. Their remarkable fossil history extends back more than 300 million years and includes the popular dinosaurs, various groups of marine reptiles, and the famous sail-backed Dimetrodon. There is little doubt that the evolutionary diversification of amniotes has been fundamental to the origin and evolution of modern terrestrial ecosystems; as such, understanding their biological history allows us to learn more about the structure of the natural world of the present day. Amniotes also provide many opportunities for investigating morphological, molecular, and ecological patterns of organismal evolution, and the fact that they originated roughly at the halfway point in metazoan evolution makes them an important group for molecular clock studies and calibrations.
It is for these reasons that amniotes are the focus of our research, in which we combine the study of fossils, genes, and living animals within a comparative phylogenetic framework.
