Re: Turtles and Crocodylians are not Reptiles - no? What are they?

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> Turtles are the closest to archosaurs now?

That's a hypothesis with a pretty venerable history. It came from doing 
cladistics with five characters and no fossils. Outside of two or three 
German universities it's extinct. Except, that is, if we take the molecular 
version -- almost all molecular analyses put the turtles either as the 
sister-group of Archosauria or as the sister-group of just the crocodiles 
alone!!!

> Now you are grouping them firmly within Diapsids at a specific position? 
> closer than lepidosaurs (snakes and lizards?) and squamates(tuataras)?

You mean squamates (lizards including snakes) and lepidosaurs (squamates and 
tuataras).

There are morphological analyses (Rieppel, deBraga, Reisz and others in 
various combinations) that put the turtles within Lepidosauromorpha, as the 
sister-group of either Euryapsida or Lepidosauria. Part of my thesis work is 
to find out if they are wrong.