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Amphibians have soft bodies with thin skins, and lack claws, defensive armour, or spines. Nevertheless, they have evolved various defence mechanisms to keep themselves alive. The first line of defence in salamanders and frogs is the mucous secretion that they produce. This keeps their skin moist and makes them slippery and difficult to grip.
Many vertebrates are limbless, limb-reduced, or apodous, with a body plan consisting of a head and vertebral column, but no adjoining limbs such as legs or fins. Jawless fish are limbless but may have preceded the evolution of vertebrate limbs, whereas numerous reptile and amphibian lineages – and some eels and eel-like fish – independently lost their limbs.
They have short vertebral columns, with no more than 10 free vertebrae and fused tailbones (urostyle or coccyx). [47] Frogs range in size from Paedophryne amauensis of Papua New Guinea that is 7.7 mm (0.30 in) in snout–vent length [ 48 ] to the up to about 35 cm (14 in) and 3.3 kg (7.3 lb) goliath frog ( Conraua goliath ) of central Africa ...
Class Amphibia (amphibians, some ancestral to the amniotes)—now a paraphyletic group; Class Synapsida (mammals and their extinct relatives) Class Sauropsida (reptiles and birds) While this traditional taxonomy is orderly, most of the groups are paraphyletic, meaning that the structure does not accurately reflect the natural evolved grouping. [47]
Scientists found that members of the new species are smaller than their offshore common bottlenose counterparts, eat different fish and have spines adapted to navigating the tight spaces of rivers ...
A. clarkii may have a yellow caudal fin. Adult A. chrysopterus are darker while the head bar is broader and not constricted or discontinuous. [ 4 ] Traditionally A. akindynos was included in the clarkii complex , however genetic analysis has shown that it is significantly different from any of the other species in the clarkii complex and ...
All living amphibians belong to the group Lissamphibia. They inhabit a wide variety of habitats, with most species living within terrestrial, fossorial, arboreal or freshwater aquatic ecosystems. Thus amphibians typically start out as larvae living in water, but some species have developed behavioural adaptations to bypass this.
Temnospondyli (from Greek τέμνειν, temnein 'to cut' and σπόνδυλος, spondylos 'vertebra') or temnospondyls is a diverse ancient order of small to giant tetrapods—often considered primitive amphibians—that flourished worldwide during the Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic periods, with fossils being found on every continent.