Animal Diversity 7th Edition by Cleveland Hickman,Larry Roberts,Susan Keen ,Allan Larson,David Eisenhour

Exercise 1

On the nineteenth-century notion of a "scale of nature," living amphibians were considered remnants of archaic terrestrial vertebrates largely superseded by "higher" forms including birds and mammals. Nonetheless, amphibian species are often more abundant and of longer evolutionary duration than avian or mammalian species. In what ways are amphibians unusually well suited for evolutionary persistence?