Herpetologist's subject

Usage examples of reptiles.

But at night even humble carnivorous protomammals must have posed a real threat to the cold-immobilized reptiles, and particularly to their eggs.

Since animal taxa such as mammals, reptiles or amphibians contain members with very different brain sizes, we cannot give a reliable estimate of the number of neurons in the brain of a typical representative of each taxon.

Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears-of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed by Newtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates.

In non-primate mammals and in reptiles, comparable ritualized behavior seems to be controlled in the same part of the brain, and lesions in this reptilian component can impair other automatic types of behavior besides ritual-for example, walking or running.

And indeed in human intrauterine development we run through stages very much like fish, reptiles and nonprimate mammals before we become recognizably human.

There is a remarkable separation of fish and reptiles from birds and mammals.

The brains of mammals are ten to one hundred times more massive than the brains of contemporary reptiles of comparable size.

This rule on the relative parental concern of mammals and reptiles is, however, by no means without exceptions.

Other methods of finding a mate have been developed in reptiles, birds and mammals.

It is possible that lower mammals and reptiles, lacking extensive frontal lobes, also lack this sense, real or illusory, of individuality and free will, which is so characteristically human and which may first have been experienced dimly by Proconsul.

I am picturing a late Mesozoic landscape in which the mammals sleep fitfully by day and the reptiles by night.

Our Mesozoic scene has a curiously vampiric quality with the carnivorous reptiles hunting the smart sleeping mammals by day, and the carnivorous mammals hunting the stupid immobile reptiles by night.

While the reptiles buried, their eggs, it is unlikely that they actively protected either eggs or young.

There are very few accounts of such behavior even in contemporary reptiles, and it is difficult to picture Tyrannosaurus rex brooding on a clutch of eggs.

There are today a few remaining large reptiles on Earth, the most striking of which is the Komodo dragon of Indonesia: cold-blooded, not very bright, but a predator exhibiting a chilling fixity of purpose.