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Amphibians are ectothermic, anamniotic, four-limbed vertebrate animals that constitute the class Amphibia. In its broadest sense, it is a paraphyletic group encompassing all tetrapods excluding the amniotes (tetrapods with an amniotic membrane, such as modern reptiles, birds and mammals).
Aquatic mammal. An Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis), a member of the infraorder Cetacea of the order Cetartiodactyla. Aquatic mammals and semiaquatic mammals are a diverse group of mammals that dwell partly or entirely in bodies of water. They include the various marine mammals who dwell in oceans, as well as various freshwater species ...
The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) (/ ˌhɪpəˈpɒtəməs /; pl.: hippopotamuses; also shortened to hippo (pl.: hippos), further qualified as the common hippopotamus, Nile hippopotamus, or river hippopotamus, is a large semiaquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae ...
A mammal (from Latin mamma 'breast') [1] is a vertebrate animal of the class Mammalia (/ məˈmeɪli.ə /). Mammals are characterized by the presence of milk -producing mammary glands for feeding their young, a broad neocortex region of the brain, fur or hair, and three middle ear bones.
While reptiles and amphibians can be quite similar externally, the French zoologist Pierre André Latreille recognized the large physiological differences at the beginning of the 19th century and split the herptiles into two classes, giving the four familiar classes of tetrapods: amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. [30]
The term amniote comes from the amnion, which derives from Greek ἀμνίον (amnion), which denoted the membrane that surrounds a fetus. The term originally described a bowl in which the blood of sacrificed animals was caught, and derived from ἀμνός (amnos), meaning "lamb". [17]
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Class Amphibia (amphibians, some ancestral to the amniotes)—now a paraphyletic group; Class Synapsida (mammals and the extinct mammal-like reptiles) Class Sauropsida (reptiles and birds) While this traditional classification is orderly, most of the groups are paraphyletic, i.e. do not contain all descendants of the class's common ancestor. [46]