Triadobatrachus massinoti is a batrachian known from a single fossil from the Early Triassic of Madagascar that presents a combination of apomorphic salientian and plesiomorphic batrachian characters. Herein we offer a revised description of the specimen based on X-ray micro-tomography data. We report previously unknown caudal vertebrae, possible mentomeckelians, and hidden parts of other structures. We also confirm the presence of a ventrolateral ledge on the opisthotic, and we rectify some previous interpretations. There are no cervical ribs and the jaw may have had an angular. The presacral region is composed of 15 vertebrae with a unique atlas-axis complex instead of 14 vertebrae with a bipartite atlas. The configuration of the pelvic girdle is not very clear, although it is likely more plesiomorphic than the anuran-like condition previously assumed. Our re-assessment of the saltatorial performance of Triadobatrachus supports the traditional interpretation that this animal was not a specialised jumper. In order to assess the sequence of events in the early evolution of the salientian morphotype, we estimated the ancestral length of the trunk region of batrachians under different hypotheses of lissamphibian relationships and divergence times. Most of our results suggest that some trunk reduction took place before the divergence of caudates and salientians (presumably in the Permian), and that the trunk of Triadobatrachus mostly reflects this ancestral condition. Thus, trunk reduction possibly preceded the anteroposterior elongation of the ilia and the shortening of the tail seen in Triadobatrachus. We also provide an updated review of the data relevant for the use of Triadobatrachus as a calibration constraint in molecular divergence age analyses that meets recently-suggested standards.

Several attempts to resolve the phylogeny of turtles in the clade Geoemydidae using morphology have been unsuccessful, in part because of unusually high levels of polymorphism. This has hindered the integration of the geoemydid fossil record into a phylogenetic framework. Many methods, shown to improve phylogenetic inference, allow the incorporation of different amounts of state frequency information from polymorphic characters into a phylogenetic analysis. Here, we present a new character matrix for the shell of geoemydids and assess the performance of polymorphism coding methods ('majority', 'generalized frequency coding', 'polymorphic' and 'missing') in a phylogenetic analysis by comparing the result topology of each method with a reference molecular phylogeny. The four coding methods failed to recover trees that were both well resolved and highly congruent with the reference phylogeny. Moreover, contrary to previous studies, the coding methods that made more use of character states frequencies did not perform better. However, a leave-one-out subsampling analysis suggested that despite these problems, the new matrix can still be used to place fossils in the geoemydid phylogeny with some reliability. Finally, we provide a list of characters that diagnose the major clades in our molecular reference tree.

In a previous study, we estimated the cranial disparity of turtles (Testudinata) through time using geometric morphometric data from both terminal taxa and hypothetical ancestors to compensate for temporal gaps in the fossil record. While this method yielded reasonable results for the Mesozoic and the early Cenozoic, we found a large drop in cranial disparity for the Miocene, for which we found no correlation with known environmental changes or extinction events. Instead, we speculated that the Miocene dip was a result of poor sampling of fossils or ancestors in this time bin. To countervail this problem, we here updated our original dataset and interpolated changes of shape along the branch lengths and compared them with the previous data. We furthermore explored the impact of topological and temporal uncertainty, demonstrating that the Miocene dip, indeed, is a sampling artefact. All remaining conclusions of the previous study could be more or less supported, nevertheless, including an apparent correlation with global biogeographic events, a minor correlation between cranial disparity and global temperature, and resilience across the K/T extinction event.