New stem-lepidosaurs from Vellberg, Germany: Implications for palaeoecology in the early diversification of Lepidosauromorpha

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 ne..., CT scanning
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).
Phylogenetic Analyses
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 addit..., , # 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, pl...,