DOI: 10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dfk
title: New stem-lepidosaurs from Vellberg, Germany: Implications for palaeoecology in the early diversification of Lepidosauromorpha

description: Lepidosauromorphs account for roughly a third of the living diversity of
 land vertebrates and yet their origin and early evolutionary history
 remain highly contentious. The fossil record of early lepidosauromorphs
 has been historically very poor, but this has been changing in recent
 years with new taxa reported from Europe and the North America, in
 particular the contributions from Vellberg, South-Western Germany. Here,
 we describe four new early lepidosauromorph taxa from the same locality
 (Airistagiz seegesi, Hohlachia multidens, Klainjosaura staroskalja, gen.
 et sp. novae, and an unnamed taxon), raising the number of known
 lepidosauromorphs from three to seven. The new taxa share many
 similarities, but are at the same time very distinctive from the previous
 known ones. The importance of the Central European Basin for the origin of
 several reptile groups like archosauromorphs and turtles had already been
 demonstrated with iconic fossils like Protorosaurus and Pappochelys, but
 these new findings now include lepidosauromorphs, the second-most diverse
 group of amniotes, and highlights the importance of the systematic
 exploration of small taxa in Lagerstätten.
description: <strong>CT scanning</strong> All
 specimens were CT-scanned at the Carl Zeiss Quality Excellence Center
 Stuttgart, with a Metrotom 800 Generation 1 scanner (S. Tomaschko Zeiss
 Computertomographie Dienstleistung, Essingen, Germany), except for SMNS
 91319, which was CT scanned at the Carl Zeiss Quality Excellence Center
 Aalen, and SMNS 91110-B, CT scanned at the Senckenberg HEP, University of
 Tübingen with a Phoenix V|tome|x s240 (GE Sensing and Inspection
 Technologies GmbH, Wunstorf, Germany). The particular settings for each
 specimen can be found in the manuscript. Segmentations and measurements
 were made using the software VG Studio Max 2.0 and VG Studio Max 3.3
 (Volume Graphics, Heidelberg, Germany).
 <strong>Phylogenetic Analyses</strong>
 Two different methods of phylogenetic analysis were used to
 assess the placement of the new taxa, a Parsimony and a Bayesian approach.
 The dataset used to assess the phylogenetic relationships of the new taxa
 was that of Ford et al. (2021) because it represents one of the latest
 additions to the lepidosauromorph fossil and anatomical record which also
 included all pertinent Vellberg taxa. Given the close anatomical
 similarity of the new taxa and the high incompleteness two of them, only
 the remaining two were scored in the matrices. In addition to the
 exclusion of <em>Palaeagama</em>, as carried out in the
 original study, modifications to character scorings were made following
 recent publications on key taxa, namely: <em>Prolacerta
 broomi</em> (Sobral 2023), <em>Protorosaurus
 speneri</em> (Schoch et al. in review), and <em>Youngina
 capensis</em> (Hunt et al. 2023). Furthermore, some scorings for
 <em>Vellbergia barthomolaei</em> (Sobral et al. 2020) were
 also modified. A complete list of modifications can be found in the
 Supplemental Material. The parsimony analyses were
 performed in the software TNT (Goloboff & Morales 2003) with an
 equal weight approach. A TBR search with 1,000 replications each and 10
 trees stored per replication was applied. The Bayesian analyses were run
 in MrBayes 3.2.6 (Ronquist et al. 2012) on the CIPRES Science Gateway
 server (phylo.org) with the same settings as applied by the original study
 of Ford et al. (2021). The character–taxon matrix used in the analyses, as
 well as the TNT and MrBayes scripts, can also be found in the Supplemental
 Material.
description: # New stem-lepidosaurs from Vellberg, Germany: Implications for
 palaeoecology in the early diversification of Lepidosauromorpha
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dfk](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dfk) ## Description of the data and file structure This supplementary information contains the following files: **SM_SuppFigs.pdf** Extra figures that support the main text of the publication including additional and duplicate elements of taxa, and results illustrating sets of additonal analyses as described in the main text. **SM_VellbergTaxa_PhylogeneticAnalyses.zip** Files pertaining to the main phylogenetic analyses of the corresponding manuscript, including a list of taxa and characters subject to modification in the current work, a nexus file with the modified matrix and with the addition of the ne taxa, and TNT and TXT files of the aforementioned matrix with coding for Parsimony and Bayesian analysis of the dataset, respectively. For detail on how the codes were run, please refer to the publication. **SMNS91110-Ai_SurfaceModels.zip** **SMNS91110-Aii_SurfaceModels.zip** **SMNS91270_SurfaceModels.zip** **SMNS91319_SurfaceModels.zip** **SMNS91643_SurfaceModels.zip** Zip files containing 3D surface models of the segmented elementes of the newly described taxa in PLY format. Please notice files may not be globally oriented, so that opening all files simultaneously may not show their original position in the fossil material. For information on the settings of original CT scans, please refer to the publications. The image stacks are available on MorphoSource – please consult publication for the DOI of the CT scan files. #### Code/software The Supplementary Figures can be viewed with a PDF reader. The data related to the phylogenetic analyses require MS Word, Mesquite or similar (data matrix in NEX format), TNT, and MrBayes or similar. #### Access information Other publicly accessible locations of the data: * **[https://www.morphosource.org/projects/000704152/temporary_link/M76D83hhXA6Yp2gDnR2TdnSV?locale=en](https://www.morphosource.org/projects/000704152/temporary_link/M76D83hhXA6Yp2gDnR2TdnSV?locale=en)** Data was derived from the following sources: * Palaeontological Collections of the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart