REPTILE FACTS

There are 8,240 species of reptiles in the world, inhabiting every continent except Antarctica.

Reptiles and amphibians are cold-blooded, or "ectothermic,"
animals, which means that they depend on external sources,
such as the sun, to maintain their body temperatures. Since
they don't burn energy to heat internal "furnaces," reptiles
eat 30 to 50 times less food than do birds and mammals
(warm-blooded animals) of similar sizes.


Only a few hundred of the world's 3,000 snakes are venomous.
In the United States, only rattlesnakes, copperheads,
cottonmouths, and coral snakes are poisonous. More Americans
die each year from bee and wasp stings than from snake bites.



One way to tell a frog and a toad apart: frogs have smooth,
clammy skin, while toads have more dry, bumpy skin. Both
frogs and toads lay their eggs in water, but toads spend
more of their time on land than do frogs.

                     

Frogs can breathe not only with their lungs, but also
through their skin. A frog's skin is thin and contains
many mucous glands that keep it moist. Oxygen can be
absorbed through this thin, damp skin.


The emerald tree boa can strike a bird or small mammal in
complete darkness. The pits along the lips of most boas and
pythons, and the nostril-like cavities of pit vipers, are
infrared heat receptors. Snakes use these pits to sense the
location of anything that differs in temperature from its
surroundings by as little as 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.