Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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]
The pages in this category are redirects from the vernacular ("common") names of amphibians to the scientific names. These pages are a subset of all redirects to scientific names. To add a redirect to this category, place {{Rcat shell|{{R to scientific name|1=amphibian}}}} on the second new line (skip a line) after #REDIRECT [[Target page name ...
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.
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.
The largest living amphibian is the 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in) South China giant salamander (Andrias sligoi), but this is dwarfed by prehistoric temnospondyls such as Mastodonsaurus which could reach up to 6 m (20 ft) in length. The study of amphibians is called batrachology, while the study of both reptiles and amphibians is called herpetology.
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.