Westlothiana

Common card · No. 419311

Westlothiana ("animal from West Lothian") is an extinct genus of tetrapods from the Mississippian (early Carboniferous) of Scotland. It is known from a single species, Westlothiana lizziae. Westlothiana is one of the most noted fossils of the East Kirkton Quarry fossil site, living about 341 million years ago during the Viséan age. It was a small tetrapod with a long body, short limbs (with five toes on the hindlimb), and a blunt-nosed skull with small fangs on the roof of the mouth. The classification of Westlothiana has gone through much revision. It was initially regarded as the oldest known reptile (or, more specifically, the oldest known member of Amniota, the group containing reptiles, mammals, and birds). Within a few years, it was reevaluated to be not quite an amniote, but rather a non-amniote tetrapod (an amphibian, in the broad sense). For decades, Westlothiana was still considered a "reptiliomorph" (an amphibian more closely related to amniotes than to modern amphibians). This...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Millerettidmayhem, CC BY-SA 4.0