Ta sfouggaria einai zoa!!

No idea how I got into it, but have just spent a little time googling about and want to share what I found. Two or three things stick out as wierd:

1) Frogs have no ribs. I kid you not, I have been googling google images for frog skeleton and they just have little jutty-out things but not what you or I would call ribs.

2) Salamanders have ribs. These freaky little glisteny guys have the most basic of tetrapod body plans. I found a photo of some guy holding a sack full of salamander-spawn which looked like overlarge frogspawn - yukky yuk, but google is my friend.

3) there exist amphibians which are neither froggy-toads nor newty-salamanders. These are called caecilians and they have no arms or legs - one of these grows to some 75cm and is the largest tetrapod to have no lungs.

So why all the fascination with amphibians? Well the BBC has a page all about how they are all dying and endangered as hell, and I said to myself, hang about there , Stelios, mate, learn about these little buggers before they all die out. So off I went to the Tree of Life website for a look. We have the frogs and toads lot, who have no ribs and have different sized and shaped arms than legs, we have the caudata - "tailed" amphibians who have, like, tails and similar fore and aft limbs and they stick out at right angles to the body, etc; and then we got the freaky caecilians who have no limbs and a little bit of a tail sometimes and some of them make eggs and others give birth to live young and others give birth from eggs to live young inside them and let them sit around until they are mature. All pretty exciting stuff, but tolweb is silent on them.

Amphibians ruled the world back in the Carboniferous.

Poor bastards.

So much to learn, so little time.