Earth is the only known planet up to date which sustains life. A few millions years ago, Earth was home to the one of the most vicious and devastating creatures well-known to mankind ̶ dinosaur. Wrapped in a cocoon of evolution, Earth, along with most living beings, had endured metamorphosis, transforming the world to what it is now. Gigantic deadly dinosaurs went extinct, whilst only a minority that survived mutated into smaller-sized animals. Animals that roam the Earth are classified into three major categories, namely mammals, reptiles and amphibians, where each category is further divided into their respective orders (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).
The first major type of animal is mammal. There are more than 4,000 different species of mammals. The smallest is the hog-nosed bat, which weighs 0.05 ounces. The largest is the blue whale, which can be 100 feet long and weigh 150 tons. But whether they live on land or water, all mammals share some common characteristics. All mammals are vertebrates. They have either a backbone or a spine. Besides, all mammals are endothermic, also known as “warm-blooded”. They regulate their own body temperature which allows them to live in almost every climate on Earth. Mammals have hair or fur on their bodies. Furthermore, they produce milk to feed their babies. This allows them to spend more time with their young and teach them important skills they need to survive on their own.
As Peterson (2006) mentioned, the word mammal is derived from the milk-producing mammary glands that are unique to the class Mammalia. Mammals owe their spectacular success to many features. Many of the most important and most diagnostic mammalian characteristic serve to further intelligence and sensory ability, t...
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...alliday, 2002). Caecilian is a type of Gymnophionan.
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3 Apr. 2014. The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'. http://eol.org/pages/323582/details>. Evans, Arthur V., Rosser W. Garrison, Neil Schlager, and Michael Hutchins. Grzimeks' Animal Life Encyclopedia.
Hyla versicolor, commonly know as the Gray Tree Frog or the Eastern Gray Tree Frog, is an amphibian that is referred to as the “Chameleon of the Frog world” (Craighead, 2004, p.1) because of its ability to change colors. “This frog was once thought to be the same species as the Cope’s Gray Tree Frog”. They can only be distinguished by their calls and the fact that the Cope Gray Tree Frog is diploid while the Gray Tree Frog is tetraploid (NPWRC, 2004). The Gray Tree Frog is classified as follows:
Taylor, Robert E., and Thomas G. Fields. Scientific Farm Animal Production in Introduction to Animal Science. 8th Ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 200
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The story Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton, starts off with Mike Bowman taking a vacation with his family on the coast of Costa Rica. As they cruise on their Land Rover, Tina, Bowman’s daughter, runs off after spotting three-toed bird tracks. Tina then encounters a big lizard that makes chirping sounds, and is attacked by it. She is later sent to the hospital, where Dr. Gutierrez is intrigued to find out about the lizard that bit her left arm. Gutierrez goes back to the beach where Tina was attacked, and finds the carcass of a brown-striped lizard. The carcass is sent to the Tropical Diseases Laboratory of Columbia University Medical Center, where it is examined and analyzed. Despite the efforts made, no one is able to identify the lizard’s species, so the carcass is later sent to the Museum of Natural History for further analysis.
...ould estimate where they spent most of their time. By the length of the other skeletal bones, the size and shape of the animals could be determined, which also shared insight to its behavior. The largest primitive whales could indeed walk on land, but only did so for short periods because their legs could not take so much weight for long amounts of time. These behaviors allow scientists and paleontologists to understand even more as to how these fascinating and mysterious animals went from ruling on land to taking over the sea.
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Earth has gone through five fully major extinctions before. We currently are in the process of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. This mass extinction is closely related in severity to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Earth’s extinctions are broken into three different areas. The first area was the large number of animals caught by hunter-gathers. The discovery of agriculture led to the second area of extinction, wildlife habitats. These wildlife habitats were destroyed due to humans starting to stay in one area.
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