What are amphibans?

Question

What are amphibans?

Answer 1

Amphibians are organisms that can live both on land and underwater. They have specialized structures (webbed feet for swimming, lungs for breathing air on land) which help them in doing so.

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Answer 2

Amphibians are creatures which can live both in the water and on land, and some examples of these are newts and salamanders, frogs and toads. In water, the amphibians can both walk and swim, but they tend to move quite slowly on land unless, like frogs, they can jump. Their skin is soft and damp, unlike snakes whose skin is dry and scaly, and they mostly have lungs instead of gills. To a certain extent, though, they can breathe through their skins, and some amphibians do have gills. Amphibians lays eggs - everyone has seen frog spawn, a blob of transparent, jelly-like balls with a black speck in the middle of each ball which will later become the tadpole. Toad spawn is in long strings like necklaces.

Answer 3

Traditionally, amphibians have included all tetrapods that are not amniotes. They are divided into three subclasses, of which two are only known as extinct subclasses:

Subclass Labyrinthodontia (diverse Paleozoic and early Mesozoic group)

Subclass Lepospondyli (small Paleozoic group)

Subclass Lissamphibia (frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, etc.)

Of these only the last subclass includes recent species.

With the cladistic revolution, this classification has been modified, or changed, and the Labyrinthodontia discarded as being a paraphyletic group without unique defining features apart from shared primitive characteristics. Classification varies according to the preferred phylogeny of the author, and whether they use a stem-based or node-based classification. Generally amphibians are defined as the group that includes the common ancestors of all living amphibians (frogs, salamanders, etc) and all their descendants. This may also include extinct groups like the temnospondyls (traditionally placed in the disbanded subclass "labyrinthodontia"), and the Lepospondyls. This means that there are a now large number of basal Devonian and Carboniferous tetrapod groups, described as "amphibians" in earlier books, that are no longer placed in the formal Amphibia.