Whois & Analysis for backwaterreptiles.com

Reptiles are tetrapod (four-limbed vertebrate) animals in the class Reptilia, comprising today's turtles, crocodilians, snakes, amphisbaenians, lizards, tuatara, and their extinct relatives.

The study of these traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology.

Turtles are reptiles of the order Testudines (or Chelonii) characterised by a special bony or cartilaginous shell developed from their ribs and acting as a shield.

"Turtle" may refer to the order as a whole (American English) or to fresh-water and sea-dwelling testudines (British English).

In biology, a species (abbreviated sp., with the plural form species abbreviated spp) is the basic unit of biological classification and a taxonomic rank.

A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which two individuals can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.

While this definition is often adequate, looked at more closely it is problematic.

For example, with hybridisation, in a species complex of hundreds of similar microspecies, or in a ring species, the boundaries between closely related species become unclear.

Other ways of defining species include similarity of DNA, morphology, or ecological niche.

Lizards are a widespread group of squamate reptiles, with over 6,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains.

The group is paraphyletic as it excludes the snakes which are also squamates.

Snakes are elongated, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears.

Like all 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 with their highly mobile jaws.

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.