Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2015
In a series of recent papers, colleagues and I (Milner, 1994; Carroll, 1998; Anderson, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Anderson et al., 2003) have revised Aïstopoda, a collection of elongate, limbless tetrapods from the Paleozoic of Euramerica. Aïstopods are part of a larger, monophyletic assemblage of tetrapods known as lepospondyls, which are proving to be critical to understanding the early evolution of amniotes and are possibly related to the origins of some, or all, modern amphibians (Carroll, 1995, 2000a, 2000b; Laurin and Reisz, 1997, 1999; Laurin, 1998; Anderson, 2001; Ruta et al., 2003; Vallin and Laurin, 2004).