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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.
As embryos, vertebrates still have a notochord; as adults, all but the jawless fishes have a vertebral column, made of bone or cartilage, instead. [7] Vertebrate embryos have pharyngeal arches; in adult fish, these support the gills, while in adult tetrapods they develop into other structures. [10] [11]
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 ...
Osteichthyes (/ ˌ ɒ s t iː ˈ ɪ k θ iː z / ost-ee-IK-theez; from Ancient Greek ὀστέον (ostéon) 'bone' and ἰχθύς (ikhthús) 'fish'), [2] also known as osteichthyans or commonly referred to as the bony fish, is a diverse superclass of vertebrate animals that have endoskeletons primarily composed of bone tissue.
Many temnospondyls are much larger than living amphibians, and superficially resemble crocodiles, which has led many taxa to be named with the suffix -suchus.The largest taxa, which were predominantly the Mesozoic stereospondyls, had skulls exceeding one meter in length, and the entire animal would have been several meters in length (for reference, the largest living amphibian, Andrias, is ...
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).
Adult sea urchins are usually well protected against most predators by their strong and sharp spines, which can be venomous in some species. [32] The small urchin clingfish lives among the spines of urchins such as Diadema ; juveniles feed on the pedicellariae and sphaeridia, adult males choose the tube feet and adult females move away to feed ...