Amphibians are ectothermic, tetrapod vertebrates of the class Amphibia. They inhabit a wide variety of habitats, with most species living within terrestrial, fossorial, arboreal or freshwater aquatic ecosystems. Amphibians use their skin as a secondary respiratory surface and some small terrestrial salamanders and frogs lack lungs and rely entirely on their skin. The number of known amphibian species is approximately 8,000, of which nearly 90% are frogs.
About Amphibian in brief
Amphibians are ectothermic, tetrapod vertebrates of the class Amphibia. 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. Amphibians use their skin as a secondary respiratory surface and some small terrestrial salamanders and frogs lack lungs and rely entirely on their skin. The number of known amphibian species is approximately 8,000, of which nearly 90% are frogs. The smallest amphibian in the world is a frog from New Guinea with a length of just 7. 7 mm. The largest living amphibian is the 1. 8 m South China giant salamander, but this is dwarfed by the extinct 9 m Prionosuchus from the middle Permian of Brazil. The study of amphibians is called batrachology, while the study of both reptiles and amphibians is called herpetology. The word \”amphibian\” is derived from the Ancient Greek term meaning ‘both kinds of life’. It was initially used as a general adjective for animals that could live on land or in water, including seals and otters. In recent decades there has been a dramatic decline in amphibian populations for many species around the globe. The three modern orders of amphibian are Anura, Urodela, and Apoda. The actual number of species in each group depends on the taxonomic classification followed.
The two most common systems are the classification adopted by the website AmphibiaWeb, University of California, Berkeley and the classification by herpetologist Darrel Frost and the American Museum of Natural History, available as the online reference database \” amphibian Species of the World\”. The numbers of species cited above follows Frost and, as of March 31, 2019 is exactly 8,00, of whom nearly 90 per cent arefrogs. It has been suggested that the common ancestor of all amphibians and amniotes is included in Amphibia and becomes a paraphyletic group, even though it is usually considered a clade, a group of species that have evolved from a common ancestor. The phylogeny of Paleozoic amphibians are uncertain, and Lissampshibia may possibly fall within extinct groups, like the Temnospondyli or the Lepospondyi, and in some analyses even in large amphibian- basal groups. This means that advocates of phylogenetic nomenclature have removed a number of Amphibia-type tetrapods that were formerly placed in the Amphibia class. If this is the case, Amphibia becomes a cladistic taxonomy, and Amphibia is included under cladisticTaxonomy and included under Amphibia, Amphibia and Amphibian Class. The Amphibia in its widest sense was divided into three subclasses, two of which are extinct:
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This page is based on the article Amphibian published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
