Osteolepiformes are a group of prehistoric lobe-finned fishes which appears first time during the Devonian

Devonian

The Devonian is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic Era spanning from the end of the Silurian Period, about 416.0 ± 2.8 Mya , to the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, about 359.2 ± 2.5 Mya...

 period. The order contains five families: Canowindridae

Canowindridae

Canowindridae is a family of prehistoric lobe-finned fishes which lived during the Devonian period . Fossils of fishes that belonged to this family have been found in Australia, Antarctica and Europe....

, Elpistostegidae, Megalichthyidae

Megalichthyidae

Megalichthyidae is a family of prehistoric lobe-finned fishes which lived during the Carboniferous period ....

, Osteolepidae

Osteolepidae

Osteolepidae is a family of prehistoric lobe-finned fishes which lived during the Devonian period....

 and Tristichopteridae

Tristichopteridae

Tristichopterids , were a diverse and successful group of tetrapodomorph fishes throughout the Late Devonian stage. They first appeared in the Givetian epoch of the Middle Devonian stage...

. The superorder is generally considered to be paraphyletic because the characters that define it are mainly attributes of stem tetrapodomorphs

Stem Tetrapoda

Stem Tetrapoda is a cladistically defined group, consisting of all animals more closely related to extant four legged vertebrates than to their closest extant relatives , but excluding the crown group Tetrapoda...

.

Below is a cladogram

Cladogram

A cladogram is a diagram used in cladistics which shows ancestral relations between organisms, to represent the evolutionary tree of life. Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characters, DNA and RNA sequencing data and computational...

 showing the paraphyly of Osteolepiformes modified from Ahlberg and Johanson (1998): The Osteolepiformes are marked by the green bracket.

External links

• Tree of Life