Procera

High school (ages 12+)
Animals & Nature

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/procera

1. What is the hypothetical clade name?
2. What is the proposed sister groups?
3. Why do scientists think salamanders and caecilians might be more closely related?
4. How does the Procera idea change our view of amphibian families?

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the hypothetical clade name?Procera
2. What is the proposed sister groups?Salamanders and Caecilians
3. Why do scientists think salamanders and caecilians might be more closely related?Some scientists look at shared bone shapes and DNA patterns that seem more similar between salamanders and caecilians than between either and frogs.
4. How does the Procera idea change our view of amphibian families?If true, it would show that salamanders and caecilians share a common ancestor, meaning their differences like limb loss happened together, not separately.

Phylogeny: The evolutionary history and relationships among individuals or groups of organisms, often depicted as a branching tree.
Synapomorphy: A shared derived characteristic that is present in an ancestral species and all of its descendant species, used to define clades.
Phylogenetic Tree: A diagram that represents the evolutionary relationships among a set of organisms, showing how they have diverged from common ancestors over time.