How to Use tetrapod in a Sentence

tetrapod

noun
  • These include Panderichthys, a fish with a large tetrapod-like head and a muscular pair of front fins.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 6 Jan. 2010
  • Our moon’s tides most likely played a role in evolution, shepherding the first plants and tetrapods from the salty marshes of the coasts and onto land.
    Rebecca Boyle, Scientific American, 1 Mar. 2021
  • The bite would have been the largest of any tetrapod (the animal group that includes mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians).
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 30 June 2010
  • At some point, four-legged tetrapods that had lived in the water some 300 million years ago decided to submerge themselves once again, perhaps to avoid predators.
    Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 10 Aug. 2023
  • When this tetrapod was alive, neither threat existed yet.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 23 Oct. 2019
  • Previous research had shown that HoxD13 is active in the developing tetrapod limb when the wrists and digits form.
    John A. Long, Scientific American, 20 May 2020
  • Here’s an unorthodox solution to slippery soap: Shape it like a tetrapod.
    Liz Stinson, Curbed, 22 May 2018
  • Dasen and his colleagues also looked at a genetic transcription factor called Foxp1, located at the spinal cord in tetrapods.
    Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • There’s Elginerpeton pancheni, an early tetrapod that lived outside the ocean sometime around 375 million years ago.
    Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • In addition to the latter’s markings, the team found three different pathways marked by small footprints that probably belonged to smaller tetrapods that had waded through the water.
    Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Multiple losses of opsin genes have occurred as tetrapods—a group including amphibians, reptiles, and mammals—have evolved.
    Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 12 July 2023
  • This gave rise to the tetrapods, or four-limbed vertebrates, that included dinosaurs, land animals and eventually humans.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 18 Mar. 2020
  • While most tetrapods — which includes all four-limbed, land-living vertebrates, such as frogs, turtles, hawks and humans — have five digits or fewer, the distant ancestors of amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles used to have more.
    Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 19 Sep. 2023
  • Once ashore, these four-limbed vertebrates, called tetrapods, branched into an impressive range of animals: amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals.
    Gemma Tarlach, Discover Magazine, 26 June 2017
  • The exact species and classification have yet to be determined, but the fossil is a tetrapod -- meaning animal with four legs -- and could be an early ancestor of either reptiles or mammals.
    Sherry Liang, CNN, 5 Nov. 2021
  • Image In land vertebrates, or tetrapods, walking is partly characterized by this left-right alternation as well as rhythms of extending and flexing.
    Steph Yin, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018
  • This tetrapod, dubbed Parmastega aelidae, looked similar to a crocodile, except its protruding eyes were on top of its head.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 23 Oct. 2019
  • To help solve this mystery, scientists created a robot based off fossils of Orobates pabsti, a plant-eating tetrapod about 33 inches long (85 centimeters).
    Charles Choi, Discover Magazine, 17 Jan. 2019
  • An excavation exposed a wall of fossils there in 2016, during road construction, and led to this and a number of other discoveries, including the fossil of an early tetrapod, the massive fish’s likely prey.
    Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 7 Mar. 2023
  • Scientists had diagrammed the somewhat smooth distributions of other tetrapods—vertebrates descended from the earliest four-limbed creatures.
    Mark Fischetti, Scientific American, 1 Apr. 2018
  • But Eusthenopteron foordi, another stem tetrapod that comes after Paleospondylus, had paired fins and cranial development even in juveniles.
    Connor Lynch, Discover Magazine, 20 June 2022
  • The importance of global parsimony and historical bias in understanding tetrapod evolution.
    Darren Naish, Scientific American Blog Network, 7 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tetrapod.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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