Читать книгу Dragons of the Air: An Account of Extinct Flying Reptiles - H. G. Seeley - Страница 7

The relations of reptiles to other animals may be stated so as to make evident the characters and affinities which bind them together. Early in the nineteenth century naturalists included with the Reptilia the tribe of salamanders and frogs which are named Amphibia. The two groups have been separated from each other because the young of Amphibia pass through a tadpole stage of development. They then breathe by gills, like fishes, taking oxygen from the air which is suspended in water, before lungs are acquired which afterwards enable the animals to take oxygen directly from the air. The amphibian sometimes sheds the gills, and leaves the water to live on land. Sometimes gills and lungs are retained through life in the same individual. This amphibian condition of lung and gill being present at the same time is paralleled by a few fishes which still exist, like the Australian Ceratodus, the lung-fish, an ancient type of fish which belongs to early days in geological time.

This metamorphosis has been held to separate the amphibian type from the reptile because no existing reptile develops gills or undergoes a metamorphosis. Yet the character may not be more important as a ground for classification than the community of gills and lungs in the fish and amphibian is ground for putting them together in one natural group. For although no gills are found in reptiles, birds, or mammals, the embryo of each in an early stage of development appears to possess gill-arches, and gill-clefts between them, through which gills might have been developed, even in the higher vertebrates, if the conditions of life had been favourable to such modification of structure. In their bones Reptiles and Amphibia have much in common. Nearly all true reptiles lay eggs, which are defined like those of birds by comparatively large size, and are contained in shells. This condition is not usual in amphibians or fishes. When hatched the young reptile is completely formed, the image of its parent, and has no need to grow a covering to its skin like some birds, or shed its tail like some tadpoles. The reptile is like the bird in freedom from important changes of form after the egg is hatched; and the only structure shed by both is the little horn upon the nose, with which the embryo breaks the shell and emerges a reptile or a bird, growing to maturity with small subsequent variations in the proportions of the body.

FIG. 1 LUNG OF THE FISH CERATODUS

Partly laid open to show its chambered structure

(After Günther)