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Night Lizard
Night lizards (family Xantusiidae) are a group of small scincomorph lizards, averaging from less than to over snout–vent length. Most species are viviparous (live-bearing), with the exception of those in the genus '' Cricosaura''. The family has only three living genera, with approximately 34 living species. The genera are divided by geographic range: ''Xantusia'' in southwestern North America and Baja California, '' Cricosaura'' in Cuba, and ''Lepidophyma'', the most populous night lizard genus, in Central America. Three fossil genera are also known: ''Catactegenys'', '' Palepidophyma'', '' Palaeoxantusia''. Biology Night lizards were originally thought to be nocturnal because of their secretive lifestyle, but they are at least in some cases diurnal. Night lizards have evolved to live in very narrow environmental niches—"microhabitat specialization"—such as rock crevices or damp logs, and may spend their entire life under the same cover. Physically, night lizards are c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xantusia Vigilis
The desert night lizard (''Xantusia vigilis'') is a night lizard native to the Southern California Eastern Sierra and the San Gabriel Mountains into Baja California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and extreme western areas of Arizona. Description The desert night lizard attains a snout-to-vent length (SVL) of with a tail roughly the same length. The lizard's coloring is usually grey, yellow-brownish, or olive. Despite their name, night lizards are active during the day. They are known to easily change their color, from light olive (usually during the evening) to dark brown during the day. It is a good climber and usually eats termites, small insects, spiders and other arthropods. The desert night lizard is small for a reptile, with the average adult female at 80 mm in total length and 1.3 g in weight. The average adult male ''Xantusia vigilis'' is 65mm in total length and 1.1 g in weight. Male desert night lizards are distinguishable from females as they are lighter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Catactegenys
''Catactegenys'' is an extinct genus of xantusiid lizard from the Late Cretaceous of Texas. The type species, ''Catactegenys solaster'', was named in 2013 from the late-Campanian-age Aguja Formation in Brewster County. The genus name means "breaker jaw" in Greek, a reference to its inferred ability to break hard shells with its jaws as an adaptation for a durophagous Durophagy is the eating behavior of animals that consume hard-shelled or exoskeleton bearing organisms, such as corals, shelled mollusks, or crabs. It is mostly used to describe fish, but is also used when describing reptiles, including fossil tu ... diet, and the species name means "lone star", a reference to Texas, the "lone star state". ''Catactegenys'' is known only from jaw bones, but the size of these bones indicates that it was larger than all other known xantusiids. The teeth are robust and heavily worn, suggesting that ''Catactegenys'' may have eaten hard-shelled molluscs, which are common in the Aguja F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sexual Maturity
Sexual maturity is the capability of an organism to reproduce. In humans it might be considered synonymous with adulthood, but here puberty is the name for the process of biological sexual maturation, while adulthood is based on cultural definitions. Most multicellular organisms are unable to sexually reproduce at birth (animals) or germination (e.g. plants): depending on the species, it may be days, weeks, or years until they have developed enough to be able to do so. Also, certain cues may trigger an organism to become sexually mature. They may be external, such as drought (certain plants), or internal, such as percentage of body fat (certain animals). (Such internal cues are not to be confused with hormones, which directly produce sexual maturity – the production/release of those hormones is triggered by such cues.) Role of reproductive organs Sexual maturity is brought about by a maturing of the reproductive organs and the production of gametes. It may also be accompanied ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbivore
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, and other tough plant material. A large percentage of herbivores have mutualistic gut flora that help them digest plant matter, which is more difficult to digest than animal prey. This flora is made up of cellulose-digesting protozoans or bacteria. Etymology Herbivore is the anglicized form of a modern Latin coinage, ''herbivora'', cited in Charles Lyell's 1830 ''Principles of Geology''.J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, eds. (2000) ''The Oxford English Dictionary'', vol. 8, p. 155. Richard Owen employed the anglicized term in an 1854 work on fossil teeth and skeletons. ''Herbivora'' is derived from Latin ''herba' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Insectivore
A robber fly eating a hoverfly An insectivore is a carnivorous animal or plant that eats insects. An alternative term is entomophage, which can also refer to the human practice of eating insects. The first vertebrate insectivores were amphibians. When they evolved 400 million years ago, the first amphibians were piscivores, with numerous sharp conical teeth, much like a modern crocodile. The same tooth arrangement is however also suited for eating animals with exoskeletons, thus the ability to eat insects is an extension of piscivory. At one time, insectivorous mammals were scientifically classified in an order called Insectivora. This order is now abandoned, as not all insectivorous mammals are closely related. Most of the Insectivora taxa have been reclassified; those that have not yet been reclassified and found to be truly related to each other remain in the order Eulipotyphla. Although individually small, insects exist in enormous numbers. Insects make u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard G
Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Frankish language, Old Frankish and is a Compound (linguistics), compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic language, Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' and ''*hardu-'' 'strong, brave, hardy', and it therefore means 'strong in rule'. Nicknames include "Richie", "Dick (nickname), Dick", "Dickon", "Dickie (name), Dickie", "Rich (given name), Rich", "Rick (given name), Rick", "Rico (name), Rico", "Ricky (given name), Ricky", and more. Richard is a common English, German and French male name. It's also used in many more languages, particularly Germanic, such as Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Dutch, as well as other languages including Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Finnish. Richard is cognate with variants of the name in other European languages, such as the Swedish "Rickard", the Catalan "Ricard" and the Italian "Riccardo", among others (see comprehensive variant list below). People ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Cogger
Harold George "Hal" Cogger (born 4 May 1935) is an Australian herpetologist. He was curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Australian Museum from 1960 to 1975, and Deputy Director of the museum from 1976 to 1995. He has written extensively on Australian herpetology, and was the first author to create a field guide for all Australian frogs and reptiles. Cogger was made an honorary Doctor of Science in 1997. At least eight reptile taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ... have been named after Cogger, including one genus, six species, and one subspecies: '' Coggeria'', '' Ctenotus coggeri'', '' Emoia coggeri'', '' Geomyersia coggeri'', '' Hydrophis coggeri'', '' Lampropholis coggeri'', '' Oedura coggeri'', and '' Diporiphora nobbi coggeri''. Beolens, Bo; Watk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snakes
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty-five times independently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or more rare within a population. The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic is common or rare within a population constantly change, resulting in a change in heritable characteristics arising over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. The theory of evolution by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diurnal Animal
Diurnality is a form of plant and animal behavior characterized by activity during daytime, with a period of sleeping or other inactivity at night. The common adjective used for daytime activity is "diurnal". The timing of activity by an animal depends on a variety of environmental factors such as the temperature, the ability to gather food by sight, the risk of predation, and the time of year. Diurnality is a cycle of activity within a 24-hour period; cyclic activities called circadian rhythms are endogenous cycles not dependent on external cues or environmental factors except for a zeitgeber. Animals active during twilight are crepuscular, those active during the night are nocturnal and animals active at sporadic times during both night and day are cathemeral. Plants that open their flowers during the daytime are described as diurnal, while those that bloom during nighttime are nocturnal. The timing of flower opening is often related to the time at which preferred pollinato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nocturnal
Nocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by being active during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is "nocturnal", versus diurnal meaning the opposite. Nocturnal creatures generally have highly developed senses of hearing, smell, and specially adapted eyesight. Some animals, such as cats and ferrets, have eyes that can adapt to both low-level and bright day levels of illumination (see metaturnal). Others, such as bushbabies and (some) bats, can function only at night. Many nocturnal creatures including tarsiers and some owls have large eyes in comparison with their body size to compensate for the lower light levels at night. More specifically, they have been found to have a larger cornea relative to their eye size than diurnal creatures to increase their : in the low-light conditions. Nocturnality helps wasps, such as ''Apoica flavissima'', avoid hunting in intense sunlight. Diurnal animals, including squirrels and songbirds, are active du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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