Edwin Stephen Goodrich (1868 to 1946), born in France and most of his life a scientist working at the University of Oxford, was a famous English zoologist and palaeontologist, who was interested in research on comparative anatomy and faunistic classification.

GOODRICH (1916) considered reptiles not a monophyletic group like mammals or birds but as an assemblage or evolutionary grade pertaining to both mammals and birds. He suggested that all amniotes can be assigned to one of two clades, which must have emerged quite independently of each other, either from very primitive reptiles or directly from amphibians.

GOODRICH found that a dichotomy of the reptiles among others is documented in the anatomy of the heart and aortic arches of their extant groups when one compares their conditions with the blood circulation found in birds and mammals; and used the terms Sauropsida (= lizard faces) as well as Theropsida (= beast faces) to name the two evolutionary lineages of the amniotes.

With regard to the circulation of blood he argued that all recent reptiles show morphological development tendencies of the Sauropsida (birds and their reptilian ancestors keep respectively prefer the right aorta). With this in mind one can conclude on the other hand that the extinct mammal-like reptiles (classical synapsids) as ancestors of the mammals (left aorta is retained) favoured the increased development of the left aortic arch (Theropsida).

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GOODRICH, E.S. (1916): On the classification of the Reptilia. – Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, containing papers of a biological character 89: 261-276.

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