How to Use tetrapod in a Sentence

tetrapod

noun
  • Stem tetrapods were thought to be among the casualties.
    — Ryan Brennan, Charlotte Observer, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Most stem tetrapods went extinct long before Tanyka lived.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 6 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • Most tetrapods have teeth that face each other in the upper and lower jaws, a setup that allows animals to slice, cut and grind food.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Its existence in what is now Brazil suggests some stem tetrapods survived much longer than scientists thought.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Finding common traits among the living lungfish species could hint at what features might have been shared with the first ancestor of tetrapods.
    — Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Aug. 2024
  • Giant stem tetrapod was apex predator in Gondwanan late Palaeozoic ice age.
    — Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine, 3 July 2024
  • 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
  • The conventional wisdom has tetrapods emerging after the fishapods, not living alongside them.
    — Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine, 14 May 2025
  • One of those assumptions was that a distinct aquatic larval stage made the water-to-land transition easier for early tetrapods.
    — Jacek Krywko, ArsTechnica, 23 June 2026
  • 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
  • That event caused widespread destruction of tropical forests and loss of the humid environments many early tetrapods relied on.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 6 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • But the real value of these genomes is going to be once people start using them to understand what changes took place between these fish and the tetrapods that ultimately took over land.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 14 Aug. 2024
  • 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
  • These ancient creatures, also known as stem tetrapods, were the common ancestors of modern reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds.
    — Jacek Krywko, Ars Technica, 11 July 2024
  • The discovery of Tanyka suggests some stem tetrapods survived much longer than scientists previously thought.
    — Ryan Brennan, Miami Herald, 6 Mar. 2026
  • There’s Elginerpeton pancheni, an early tetrapod that lived outside the ocean sometime around 375 million years ago.
    — Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • This catastrophe caused widespread destruction of tropical forests and the loss of humid environments that many early tetrapods relied on.
    — Ryan Brennan, Charlotte Observer, 6 Mar. 2026
  • New animals appeared in the warmer, drier regions near the equator as four-legged vertebrates called stem tetrapods evolved and split into groups that formed the basis for modern animals.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 5 July 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • Until now, most research on these early Mesozoic sea monsters — the first tetrapods to adapt to marine life — has focused on the Northern Hemisphere.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 23 Feb. 2026
  • The region was home to a plant eating tetrapod called Lystrosaurus and carnivorous chroniosuchians, which shows that the food web became more complex fairly quickly.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 12 Mar. 2025
  • 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
  • Unlike Anything Seen Before In most tetrapods — from lizards to lions to your household cat — the teeth in the upper and lower jaws face each other.
    — Ryan Brennan, Charlotte Observer, 6 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • Back in 2021, researchers used this technology to complete the genome of the Australian lungfish—the one that maintains the limb-like fins of the ancestors that gave rise to tetrapods.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 14 Aug. 2024
  • 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

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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