Caerorhachis (meaning "suitable spine" in Greek) is an extinct genus of early tetrapod from the Early Carboniferous of Scotland, probably from the Serpukhovian stage. Its placement within Tetrapoda is uncertain, but it is generally regarded as a primitive member of the group. The type species C. bairdi was named in 1977.
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Caerorhachis (meaning "suitable spine" in Greek) is an extinct genus of early tetrapod from the Early Carboniferous of Scotland, probably from the Serpukhovian stage. Its placement within Tetrapoda is uncertain, but it is generally regarded as a primitive member of the group. The type species C. bairdi was named in 1977.
== Classification == Caerorhachis has usually been placed as a basal anthracosaur or a close relative of anthracosaurs. In this classification, Caerorhachis is a close ancestor of amniotes, or tetrapods that lay eggs on land. Caerorhachis has also been classified as the sister taxon of temnospondyls, a large group of extinct amphibians, based on the presence of several primitive traits. In fact, when it was named in 1977, Caerorhachis was thought to be a dendrerpetontid temnospondyl.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).