Sauropsida (Greek for "lizard faces") is a clade of amniotes, broadly equivalent to the class Reptilia, though typically used in a broader sense to also include extinct stem-group relatives of modern non-avian reptiles and birds (which, as theropod dinosaurs, are nested within reptiles as more closely related to crocodilians than to lizards or turtles). The most popular definition states that Sauropsida is the sibling taxon to Synapsida, the other clade of amniotes which includes mammals as its only modern representatives. Although early synapsids have historically been referred to as "mammal-like reptiles", all synapsids are more closely related to mammals than to any modern reptile. Sauropsids, on the other hand, include all amniotes more closely related to modern reptiles than to mammals. This includes Aves (birds), which are a group of theropod dinosaurs despite originally being named as a separate class in Linnaean taxonomy. The base of Sauropsida is traditionally divided into main groups of "reptiles": Eureptilia ("true reptiles") and Parareptilia ("next to reptiles"). Eureptilia encompasses all living reptiles (including birds), as well as various extinct groups. Parareptilia is typically considered to be an entirely extinct group, though a few hypotheses for the origin of turtles have suggested that they belong to the parareptiles. The clades Recumbirostra and Varanopidae, traditionally thought to be lepospondyls and synapsids respectively, may also be basal sauropsids. The term "Sauropsida" originated in 1864 with Thomas Henry Huxley, who grouped birds with reptiles based on fossil evidence. The divisions of "Eureptilia" and "Parareptilia" have been challenged in a number of recent studies, who find that they do not represent monophyletic groups. During the Permian, sauropsids were predominately small, although some pareiasaurian parareptiles weighed over 1,000 kg (2,200 lb), approaching the size of the largest dinocephalians. Following the Permian-Triassic extinction event, sauropsids would come to replace synapsids as the dominant group of tetrapods. During the Mesozoic, they diversified in marine, aerial, and terrestrial ecosystems. Sauropsids suffered a decline in diversity following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which saw the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Following the K-Pg extinction, mammals, the only living group of synapsids diversified and filled the niches left vacant following the extinction of the dinosaurs. Despite this, the remaining sauropsids also diversified, with sauropsids making up roughly 20,000 species, over twice the number of mammals, which have roughly 6,800 species.
History of classification
Huxley and the fossil gaps
The term Sauropsida ("lizard faces") has a long history, and hails back to Thomas Henry Huxley, who first used the term in 1863, originally using the term "sauroids" and his opinion that birds had risen from the dinosaurs. He based this chiefly on the fossils of Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx, that were starting to become known at the time. In the Hunterian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1863, Huxley grouped the vertebrate classes informally into mammals, sauroids, and ichthyoids (the latter containing the anamniotes), based on the gaps in physiological traits and lack of transitional fossils that seemed to exist between the three groups. Early in the following year he proposed the names Sauropsida and Ichthyopsida for the two latter. Huxley did however include groups on the mammalian line (synapsids) like Dicynodon among the sauropsids. Thus, under the original definition, Sauropsida contained not only the groups usually associated with it today, but also several groups that today are known to be in the mammalian side of the tree. Huxley stated in an 1867 lecture that "The members of the class Aves so nearly approach the Reptilia in all the essential and fundamental points of their structure, that the phrase 'Birds and greatly modified Reptiles' would hardly be an exaggerated expression of the closeness of that resemblance."
Sauropsids redefined (Goodrich, 1916) By the early 20th century, the fossils of Permian synapsids from South Africa had become well known, allowing palaeontologists to trace synapsid evolution in much greater detail. The term Sauropsida was taken up by E. S. Goodrich in 1916 much like Huxley's, to include lizards, birds and their relatives. He distinguished them from mammals and their extinct relatives, which he included in the sister group Theropsida (now usually replaced with the name Synapsida). Goodrich's classification thus differs somewhat from Huxley's, in which the non-mammalian synapsids (or at least the dicynodontians) fell under the sauropsids. Goodrich supported this division by the nature of the hearts and blood vessels in each group, and other features such as the structure of the forebrain. According to Goodrich, both lineages evolved from an earlier stem group, the Protosauria ("first lizards"), which included some Paleozoic amphibians as well as early reptiles predating the sauropsid/synapsid split (and thus not true sauropsids). His concept differed from modern classifications in that he considered a modified fifth metatarsal to be an apomorphy of the group, leading him to place Sauropterygia, Mesosauria and possibly Ichthyosauria and Araeoscelida in the Theropsida.
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