We're all just fish anyway.

Seriously though, synapsids and sauropsids share a common ancestor but are two distinct monophyletic sister lineages. Synapsids gave rise to mammals and sauropsids to reptiles (including birds which are just highly derived reptiles).

Your question just seems to be one of nomenclature rather than taxonomy/systematics though. Reptiles are reptiles from cultural carryover, even though classically the definition is paraphyletic (by excluding birds it doesn't include all descendant species of a common ancestor); in modern systematics it includes birds and makes a single clade. Mammals are a distinct monophyletic grouping and so remain a valid clade.

Changing amniote to reptile and synapsids to "mammal like reptiles" and sauropsids to "lizard like reptiles" doesn't add any clarity to things, and because lizards/birds/snakes/turtles are all fairly distinct groupings on their own it actually muddies the definition some.

Probably "câlice"

I'm on the fence about it. As mentioned, I feel like there was a lot of potential there that just didn't really get realized. I found the framing story to be weak and annoying, although I did enjoy the story about the actual house.

When were you in high school? I graduated over 20 years ago and it wasn't required then...

We have sequences of Neanderthal mitochondrial genomes, and they're significantly different enough that they can be used in reconstructing a phylogeny.

Just because the pond is #1 doesn't mean the city is.