PROETIDA Fortey & Owens 1975

Vanderlaan, Tegan A. & Ebach, Malte C., 2015, A review of the Carboniferous and Permian trilobites of Australia, Zootaxa 3926 (1), pp. 1-56 : 12

Order PROETIDA Fortey & Owens 1975

Diagnosis. See Fortey & Owens (1975: 235-236).

Remarks. Much debate has ensued since Fortey & Owens’ (1975) original diagnosis of Proetida , including whether the order is in fact monophyletic ( Hahn & Hahn 1975b; Bergström 1977; Fortey & Owens 1979). Fortey (2001) agreed that most of the characters used to originally diagnose the order are plesiomorphic and apomorphic. The single shared character that seemed to unite the families was the “adult-like” morphology of the protaspids ( Fortey 2001). However, in describing the first post-Devonian protaspids of the superfamily Proetoidea Hawle & Corda 1847, Lerosey-Aubril and Feist (2005) suggested that differences in protaspid morphologies amongst the other superfamilies within Proetida (e.g., the Aulacopleuroidea and Bathyuroidea) warranted phylogenetic separation, perhaps at the ordinal level. We follow Adrain (2011) in recognising Aulacopleurida (used above) and Proetida as two distinct clades.