What is your favourite animal? Amphibians are cool animals as well! Let’s learn five amazing amphibians facts for kids.
Amphibians often can breathe water or air at different stages in their life cycle. Amphibians such as frogs are born in water. When baby frogs are born they are called tadpoles and they look more like fish than amphibians. They live entirely in the water until they grow older when they grow legs and live both in the water and on land. The word amphibian comes from two Greek words ‘amphi’ meaning both and ‘bio’ meaning lives. Their name means that they live in both land and water.
Animals use their colouring for different jobs, such as tropical birds which use their colourful feathers to find a mate or polar bears who use their white fur to blend into snow drifts. The amphibians also use their colours to help them survive in their habitat. The bright colours of amphibians such as the poison dart frog warn away predators which might want to eat them. The brighter the colours on an amphibian the more dangerous they are, as many of them are poisonous.
This tiny amphibian is a very small species of frog. It was discovered in Papua New Guinea where they make their home in tropical forests. They measure only 7.7 millimetres long which means they are smaller than a human fingernail. It’s no surprise why scientists only found it in 2012, it must be very hard to spot in the forest.
This amphibian is fully aquatic meaning it spends most of its life in water, even though it could survive on land. The average Chinese giant salamander is around 3.8 feet long, that is 8 times the size of a normal salamander. They are known as a living fossil because they have been on Earth for around 170 million years, that’s a very old and very big amphibian.
Amphibians have been living on Earth for a very long time, and they may have been some of the first animals to live on land. The oldest type of frog in the world has been around for 190 million years. Scientists were able to find out about these very old frogs by finding fossils of them in many places around the world.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about amphibians as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic the universe is, you can move on to learn about other living organisms and STEM articles like: Rats, Chickens, Cats and Pandas.
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