Batrachians Sentence Examples

The water is expelled from the branchial chambers by one or two tubes opening by one orifice in most Batrachians.

The batrachians include a very large number of genera and species, especially in the Amazon valley.

The Reptilia include II species of the crocodile, alligator and lizard, including the savage jacare of the Amazon, several species of turtle, 4 species of batrachians, and 29 species of serpents, including the striped rattlesnake (Crotalus durissus), Lachesis mutus, and a rather rare species of Cophias.

Birds and mammals take the first place; the leading collections devote a good deal of attention to reptiles and batrachians; fishes and aquatic invertebrata are most often to be found only when there are special aquaria, whilst non-aquatic invertebrates are seldom to be seen and at most consist of a few moths and butterflies, spiders, scorpions and centipedes, molluscs and crustaceans.

Cold-blooded animals, such as reptiles and batrachians, thrive best in an equable temperature, and, especially in the case of snakes, frequently can be induced to feed only when their temperature has been raised to a certain point.

He has observed that in young specimens of Siren lacertina (the larva is still unknown) the gills are rudimentary and functionless, and that it is only in large adult specimens that they are fully developed in structure and function; he therefore concludes that the sirens are the descendants of a terrestrial type of batrachians, which passed through a metamorphosis like the other members of their class, but that more recently they have adopted a permanently aquatic life, and have resumed their branchiae by reversion.

He succeeded Haiiy as professor of mineralogy in the Museum of Natural History; but he did not confine himself to mineralogy, for it is to him that we owe the division of Reptiles into the four orders of Saurians, Batrachians, Chelonians and Ophidians.

Reptiles and batrachians are abundant, but have been little studied.

There are three species of snake, including the viper; three of lizard; and eleven of batrachians.

There are no poisonous snakes in the country, and, in a region so filled with lakes and rivers as the rainy south, only two species of batrachians.

Three coecilians, three batrachians (including a mountain-frequenting frog) and three fresh-water crustaceans are also indigenous, and about twenty-six species of land shells.

They are separated from fishes and batrachians (Pisces and Batrachians) on the one hand, and agree with reptiles, and birds (Reptilia and A y es) on the other, in the possession during intra-uterine life of the membranous vascular structures respectively known as the amnion and the allantois, and likewise in the absence at this or any other period of external gills.

Iceland possesses neither reptiles nor batrachians.

These facts militate strongly against the importance which was once attached to the dentition in the classification of the tailless batrachians.

Many authors who have devoted special attention to questions of nomenclature therefore think Reptilia and Batrachia the correct names of the two great classes into which the Linnaean Amphibia have been divided, and consider that the latter term should be reserved for the use of those who, like that great authority, the late Professor Peters, down to the time of his death in 1883, would persist in regarding reptiles and batrachians as mere sub-classes (1).

However extraordinary it may appear, especially to those who bring the living forms only into focus, that opposition should still be made to Huxley's primary division of the vertebrates other than mammals into Sauropsida (birds and reptiles) and Ichthyopsida (batrachians and fishes), it is certain that recent discoveries in palaeontology have reduced the gap between batrachians and reptiles to such a minimum as to cause the greatest embarrassment in the attempt to draw a satisfactory line of separation between the two; on the other hand the hiatus between fishes and batrachians remains as wide as it was at the time Huxley's article Amphibia (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed.) was written.

The chief character which distinguishes the Batrachians from the reptiles, leaving aside the metamorphoses, lies in the arrangement of the bones of the palate, where a large parasphenoid extends forwards as far or nearly as far as the vomers and widely separates the pterygoids.

Some authors have held that the bone on which the occipital condyles have been found most developed in some labyrinthodonts (2) represents a large basi-occipital bearing two knobs for the articulation with the first vertebra, whilst the skull of the batrachians of the present day has lost the basi-occipital, and the condyles are furnished by the exoccipitals.

The fact remains, however, that some if not all of the stegocephalous batrachians have an ossified basi-occipital.

Credner, basing his views on the discovery by him of various annectent forms between the Stegocephalia and the Rhynchocephalian reptiles, has proposed a class, Eotetrapoda, to include these forms, ancestors of the batrachians proper on the one hand, of the reptiles proper on the other.

Yet, that the Stegocephalia, notwithstanding their great affinity to the reptiles, ought to be included in the batrachians as commonly understood, seems sufficiently obvious from the mere fact of their passing through a branchiate condition, i.e.

The outcome of our present knowledge points to the Stegocephalia, probably themselves derived from the Crossopterygian fishes (8), having yielded on the one hand the true batrachians (retrogressive series), with which they are to a certain extent connected through the Caudata and the Apoda, on the other hand the reptiles (progressive series), through the Rhynchocephalians and the Anomodonts, the latter being believed, on very suggestive evidence, to lead to the mammals (9).

The Latin form being the only one entitled to recognition in zoological nomenclature, it follows that the last-mentioned names should be adopted for the three orders into which recent batrachians are divided.

Branchiosauria, nearest to the true batrachians; with persistent non-constricted notochord, surrounded by barrel-shaped, bony cylinders formed by the neural arch above and a pair of intercentra below, both these elements taking an equal share in the formation of a transverse process on each side for the support of the rib.

Degraded, worm-like batrachians of still obscure affinities, inhabiting tropical Africa, south-eastern Asia and tropical America.

Sarasin (17), whose great work on the development of Ichthyophis is one of the most important recent contributions to our knowledge of the batrachians, Amphiuma is a sort of neotenic Caecilian, a larval form become sexually mature while retaining the branchial respiration.

Credner to be identical in structure with those of Stegocephalians, the Caecilian skull presents features which are not shared by any of the tailed batrachians.

Some of the forms breathe by gills throughout their existence, and were formerly regarded as establishing a passage from the fishes to the air-breathing batrachians.

The Discoglossidae are noteworthy for the presence of short ribs to some of the vertebrae, and in some other points also they approach the tailed batrachians; they may be safely regarded as, on the whole, the most generalized of known Ecaudata.

Thus New Caledonia, which has a rich and quite special lizard-fauna, has no batrachians of its own, although the Australian Hyla aurea has been introduced with success.

Apart from a few unsatisfactory remains from the Eocene of Wyoming, fossil tailless batrachians are otherwise only known from the Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene of Europe and India.

This mode of formation of both the arch and the greater part or whole of the so-called centrum from the same cartilage explains why there is never a neuro-central suture in these batrachians.

It is in fact doubtful whether the so-called sternum of batrachians, in most cases a mere plate of cartilage, has been correctly identified as such.

The skull, in the Apoda, is remarkably solid and compact, and it possesses a postorbital or postfrontal bone (marked 1 in the figure) which does not exist in any of the other living batrachians.

In the lower jaw of most of the Ecaudata the symphysial cartilages ossify separately from the dentary bones, forming the so-called mento-meckelian bones; but these symphysial bones, so distinct in the frog, are less so in the Hylidae and Bufonidae, almost indistinguishable in the Pelobatidae and Discoglossidae, whilst in the Aglossa they do not exist any more than in the other orders of batrachians.

The pectoral girdle of the living types of batrachians is distinguishable into a scapular, a coracoidal, and a praecoracoidal region.

In these batrachians the pectoral arch falls into two distinct types - the arciferous, in which the precoracoid (+clavicle) and coracoid are widely separated from each other distally and connected by an arched cartilage (the epicoracoid), the right usually overlapping the left; and the firmi- sternal, in which both precoracoid and coracoid nearly abut on the median line, and are only narrowly separated by the more or less fused epicoracoids.

The former type is exemplified by the toads and the lower Ecaudata, whilst the latter is characteristic of the true frogs (Ranidae), although when quite young these batrachians present a condition similar to that which persists throughout life in their lower relatives.

The pelvic arch of some of the Stegocephalia contained a well ossified pubic element, whilst in all other batrachians only the ilium, or the ilium and the ischium are ossified.

The integument of tailed and tailless batrachians is remarkable for the great abundance of follicular glands, of which there may be two kinds, each having a special secretion, which is always more or less acrid and irritating, and affords a means of defence against the attacks of many carnivorous animals.

In addition to diffuse pigment (mostly in the epidermis), the skin contains granular pigment stored up r' in cells, the chromatophores, restricted to the cutis, which are highly mobile and send out r2 branches which, by contraction and expansion, may rapidly alter the coloration, most batrachians being in this respect quite comparable to the famous chameleons.

But in the Labyrinthodonta, grooves are more or less marked along the teeth and give rise to folds of the wall which, extending inwards and ramifying, produce the complicated structure, exhibited by transverse sections, whence these batrachians derive their name; a somewhat similar complexity of structure is known in some holoptychian (dendrodont) Crossopterygian fishes.

The batrachians they are confined to the vomers pericardium and palatines or to the vomers alone (37).

In most male batrachians the testes are drained by transverse canals which open into a longitudinal duct, which also receives the canals of the kidneys, so that this common duct conveys both sperma and urine.

In all the tailless batrachians (with the exception of a single known viviparous toad),the male clings to the female round the breast, at the arm-pits, or round the waist, and awaits, often for hours or days, the deposition of the ova, which are immediately fecundated by several seminal emissions.

Some of these batrachians are viviparous.

A few batrachians retain the ova within the oviducts until the young have undergone part or the whole of the metamorphosis.

Development and Metamorphosis.-In a great number of batrachians, including most of the European species, the egg is small and the food-yolk is in insufficient quantity to form an external appendage of the embryo.

With the exception of a number of forms in which the whole development takes place within the egg or in the body of the mother, batrachians undergo metamorphoses, the young passing through a free-swimming, gill-breathing period of considerable duration, during which their appearance, structure, and often their regime, are essentially different from those of the mature form.

It may be said that, on the whole, the distribution of the batrachians agrees to some extent with that of fresh-water fishes, except for the much less marked affinity between South America and Africa, although even among the former we have the striking example of the distribution of the very natural group of the aglossal batrachians, represented by Pipa in South America and by Xenopus and Hymenochirus in Africa.

Alytes obstetricans is of special interest as the first known example of paternal solicitude in Batrachians, and although many no less wonderful cases of nursing instinct have since been revealed to us, it remains the only one among European forms.