In: Biology
What kind of data have established the sister group to turtles?
In the vertibrate evolution the origin of turtles is not clearly interpreted. Paleontological and morphological studies place turtles as either evolving from the ancestor of all reptiles or as evolving from the ancestor of snakes, lizards, and tuataras. The phylogenetic position of turtles is become a current controversial issue. Recent genetic and molecular studies not supported that the turtles as basal living reptiles. The thousands of least-changed regions in the genomes of turtles and their close relatives indicated that turtles are most closely related to crocodilians and birds rather than to lizards, snakes, and tuataras. Turtles are proved to be the closer relatives to archosaurs (crocodiles and birds) than to lepidosaurs (lizards, snakes and tuatara) based on computational analysis of genomes. Archelosauria is a new group used to unite archosaurs with turtles.
So according to previous reports the molecular data of hight throughtput sequence analysis supported the placing turtles as syster group to birds and chrocodiles included