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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.
For instance, descendants of the first reptiles include modern reptiles, mammals and birds; the agnathans have given rise to the jawed vertebrates; the bony fishes have given rise to the land vertebrates; a group of amphibians, the labyrinthodonts, have given rise to the reptiles (traditionally including the mammal-like synapsids), which in ...
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 ...
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.
A neural spine sail is a large, flattish protrusion from the back of an animal formed of a sequence of extended vertebral spinous processes and associated tissues. Such structures are comparatively rare in modern animals, but have been identified in many extinct species of amphibians and amniotes. Paleontologists have proposed a number of ways ...
Amphisbaenia / æ m f ɪ s ˈ b iː n i ə / (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, [2] comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes.
A craniate is a member of the Craniata (sometimes called the Craniota), a proposed clade of chordate animals with a skull of hard bone or cartilage.Living representatives are the Myxini (hagfishes), Hyperoartia (including lampreys), and the much more numerous Gnathostomata (jawed vertebrates).
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.