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The Osteology of the Reptiles (1925) is a comprehensive survey of the reptilian skeleton for all reptile groups, including extinct reptiles such as dinosaurs and plesiosaurs, and early synapsids. It was written and illustrated by American paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston, though edited and published posthumously by the zoologist William King Gregory. In the century since it was published, numerous fossils of further early reptiles have been discovered, providing the missing connections lamented in the opening paragraph of the book.
That the reptiles were evolved from the Amphibia, and more specifically from that order known as the Temnospondyli, seems now assured. The earliest as also the most primitive reptiles that we know belong to the order called the Cotylosauria. With the exception of Eosauravus from the middle Pennsylvanian of Ohio, of which, unfortunately, the skull is unknown, our knowledge of them goes no further back than the late Carboniferous and early Permian. At that time there was a considerable diversity of known forms, belonging to at least four well-differentiated groups and twenty or more families; from which we may very properly conclude that their earliest ancestors, the beginning of their stock, lived much earlier, certainly at the beginning of the Upper Carboniferous, and very probably in Lower Carboniferous times. We therefore never can expect to find in the rocks of the Permian any real connecting link between the two classes.
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