Amphibian Quotes

Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

We don’t sleep to sleep, dammit, any more than we eat to eat . We sleep to dream. We’re amphibians. We live in two elements and we need both." Edward Nesbit

Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.

Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it. 'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys. 'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.' 'If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.' 'But if it's in pain?' said Tialys. 'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.' They moved on.

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.

imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful resource of the divine intellect, almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

Before placing her in her mother's arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births, hello, little amphibian. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here.

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

It's hard to know what to say when your best friend serenades an amphibian. On one hand, Miss Lana likes me to be sensitive. On the other hand, the Colonel says most situations don't require my input.

Ellen rose to her feet. Jack thought for a moment she was going to storm out. Instead, she picked up the pitcher of hot fudge and poured the contents onto Leesha Middleton's pink jeans and fuzzy white sweater. "Oops." Ellen sat down again and went back to eating her ice cream. Leesha screamed, a sound that could be heard in Canada. Every eye in Corcoran's was on her. She slid out of the booth and swiped ineffectually at her jeans with a napkin.Then she plucked at her ruined sweater with her thumb and forefinger. "You...you...I can't believe you did that!" Ellen licked whipped cream from the back of her spoon and looked at Leesha calmly. Leesha was tiny, but she seemed to expand, like an amphibian taking on air, then she drew herself up and retrieved her pink leather purse from the bench next to Jack. It was smeared with fudge too. "You'll pay for that, I promise you," she said to Ellen in a voice that raised the gooseflesh on Jack's neck. Then she turned and left. For a moment, Corcoran's was totally silent. Ellen looked across the table at Jack's sundae. "Are you going to finish that?

I don't remember a single monster before I met you.' he'd told Amphibian. 'Now they seem to be all over the place.' 'You mean there wasn't anything you were afraid of?' the Amphibian had asked him. 'lots.' 'What did they look like?' It was a funny question. 'They didn't look like anything. They were ideas,' Tom told him. 'Like not being able to pay rent, or being lonely.' 'That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard.' the Amphibian replied.

It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.

Amphibians—the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘double life.

Trystan walked around his desk and seated himself in his chair, ignoring Kingsley as the frog seemingly moved closer to Sage. Kingsley had sat on his desk every day for the past nearly ten years, giving Trystan quiet, unwanted counsel with his ridiculous one-worded signs. It was incredible how the amphibian only needed one word to irritate. It was a talent.

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved.

and we’ll all be martialed to the task of protecting some obscure species of newt from the ravages of a predatory industrial giant bent on planting a fetid factory on the little amphibian’s breeding ground.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

Frau Stöhr found his remarks amphibious and unfeeling.

What’s your favorite word?” Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?” He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.” I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought. “Ranunculus,” I said after a moment. “What?” “Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.” They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say. “That’s a pretty girly answer.” “Well, I am a girl.” He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire. “What about you? What’s your favorite word? I bet it’s tungsten. Or, like, amphibian.” He quirked a smile, answering, “Regurgitate.” Scrunching my nose, I stared at him. “That is a gross word.” This made him smile even wider. “I like the hard consonant sounds in it. It kinda sounds like exactly what it means.” “An onomatopoeia?” I half expected trumpets to blast revelatory music from an invisible speaker in the wall from the way Elliot stared at me, lips parted and glasses slowly sliding down his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.” “I never thought you were an idiot,” he said quietly, looking toward the box and pulling out another book to hand to me. For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances. I pretended I didn’t notice.

So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution – to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.

I'm in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.

every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.

It was difficult for them even to go to school with just a small blemish on their faces; they couldn’t imagine the stress of facing the world as an enormous amphibian.

No amphibian succeeded in adapting to salt water.

Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.

Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish—something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts—or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log.

There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, there is not a trace of it visible in the heavens. In marine life we have a similar effect. it is called implosion. When an amphibian accustomed to the black depths rises above a certain level, when the pressure to which it adapts itself is lifted, the body bursts inwardly. Are we not familiar with this spectacle in the human being also? The norsemen who went berserk, the malay who runs amuck—are these not examples of implosion and explosion? When the cup is full it runs over. but when the cup and that which it contains are one substance, what then? There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out—and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the life of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. instantly illumined, When the light is directed towards them, they are also speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling—and blinding—they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn…

All life on our planet is related, and the readout of letters in DNA shows exactly how. By comparing DNA sequences, we can compute statistically how closely related we are to anything, from monkeys to marsupials, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, crustaceans, worms, plants, protozoa, bacteria–you name it.

Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53

tough, and square-jawed, J.C. is a cold-blooded killer. Or so he claims. I think it means he likes to murder amphibians.

All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.

Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.

Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks, and moved with an amphibian gait.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

On no account take hold of a wizard's staff unless he asks you to; there are many bewildered amphibians and other crawin' things in the world today who could have benefited from this advice.

We’ve lost one-hundred-and-twenty species of amphibians since 1980 and the rate of disappearance is increasing. Frogs are also an indicator species for an ecosystem and things aren’t looking good for the natural world right now.

The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)

The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in reptilian, bird, amphibian, and fish DNA.

The whole idealism of humanity ... is on the point of tipping into nihilism — into the belief in absolute valuelessness, that is, meaninglessness... The annihilation of ideals, the new wasteland, the new arts of enduring it, we amphibians.

Living in a piecemeal and accelerated space and time, he often has trouble acknowledging his own physiognomy; left without a sexual, subjective, or moral identity, this amphibian is a being of boundaries, a borderline, or a "false self"--a body that acts, often without even the joys of such performative drunkenness. Modern man is losing his soul, but he does not know it, for the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that darkroom needs repair.

All the experiments led to one unifying conclusion: The overall structure, the shape, the pattern, of any animal is as real a part of its body as are its cells, heart, limbs, or teeth. Living things are called organisms because of the overriding importance of organization, and each part of the pattern somehow contains the information as to what it is in relation to the whole. The ability of this pattern to maintain itself reaches its height in the newts, mud puppies, and other amphibians collectively called salamanders.

These newts are one of the only amphibians to contain a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies, and that, combined with their incredible capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns to return to their original pond waters, make them an animal on par with salmon for their excellent homing capabilities. What’s particularly amazing is that in its lifetime—thanks to its innate magnetic compass—a newt usually doesn’t stray farther than just over a mile from its original pond, staying within the range of about eighteen football fields.

Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

when you’re in a rain forest, where the density and diversity of wildlife are the greatest, you will always hear critters entering the soundscape each day in a structured order, almost as if following Darwin’s timeline of evolution: insects first, then amphibians, then reptiles, then birds, then mammals.” [from an interview in Sun Magazine © 2014]

Ask a toad what is beauty. He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly, and a brown back,

Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head.

Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce

Perhaps if more people realized that coupling in higher organisms is fundamentally about bonding, not only about the drive to reproduce, there would be less prejudice against homosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is natural and common in the animal kingdom. In a 2009 review of the scientific literature, University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk, who advocate more study about the evolutionary impetus for homosexual behavior, state, “The variety and ubiquity of same-sex sexual behavior in animals is impressive; many thousands of instances of same-sex courtship, pair bonding and copulation have been observed in a wide range of species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mollusks, and nematodes.

Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey. On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.

Perhaps this is what life is - just being with each other. And perhaps this is also what death is, because the fossils of the amphibian and the mammal were found, curled up together: perhaps because of broken ribs and shared heat, or perhaps because of the universal need we have for each other. A flood buried the two together, alive, and although they sang unheard pleas, they were singing together.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys. If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard.

Now the leatherback turtle overcame the heat issue via a simple, but evolutionarily impossible solution; it is the only reptile that possesses fatty insulation known as brown adipose tissue, and the only reptile that regulates a high body temperature. This brown adipose tissue is the expression of the UCP1 gene, and, aside from the leatherbacks, is found only in mammals, amphibians, and fishes. Not one other reptile has UCP1.

the thing gripped the battered and sea-stained and case-hardened mind of Bowers as ivy grips an old wall. Bowers was close on seventy, British-born. Sixty years of sea and tossing from ship to ship, from port to port, from hemisphere to hemisphere, had left him just what he was, a man heavy with years, yet in some extraordinary fashion young. In all his time he had never risen to a command or found himself in the after-guard, he was ignorant as the mainmast of literature and art, politics and history, and he signed the pay sheet with a cross; all the same the fate of the children had perhaps made a deeper impression on this amphibian than it had on the more educated Stanistreet; the sight of the girl and her companion brought on board, so young, beautiful—yet dead, like stricken flowers, had given his simple mind a twist from which it had not recovered.

Grandmother trains me when to slip and slide and change, and when to remain inert. She tells me, "It is true, women are the keepers. We are keepers of silverware, the bites of savouries in our broth. We are the sole keepers of the keys to the almari. But child, what we really excel at is adapting. Outward, we appear fixed, planted as feet, but we are also amphibians, pulling our families through land and sea when catastrophe strikes.

This wild animal must be different. By the way,” he said, turning to Grant, “if they’re all born females, how do they breed? You never explained that bit about the frog DNA.” “It’s not frog DNA,” Grant said. “It’s amphibian DNA. But the phenomenon happens to be particularly well documented in frogs. Especially West African frogs, if I remember.” “What phenomenon is that?” “Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.” Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life—orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males. They first adopted the fighting stance of males, they developed the mating whistle of males, they stimulated the hormones and grew the gonads of males, and eventually they successfully mated with females. “You’re kidding,” Gennaro said. “And what makes it happen?” “Apparently the change is stimulated by an environment in which all the animals are of the same sex. In that situation, some of the amphibians will spontaneously begin to change sex from female to male.” “And you think that’s what happened to the dinosaurs?” “Until we have a better explanation, yes,” Grant said. “I think that’s what happened. Now, shall we find this nest?

You could also buy leopard cat, Chinese muntjac, Siberian weasel, Eurasian badger, Chinese bamboo rat, butterfly lizard, and Chinese toad, plus a long list of other reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including two kinds of fruit bat. Quite an epicure’s menu. And of course birds: cattle egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, magpies, a vast selection of ducks and geese and pheasants and doves, plovers, crakes, rails, moorhens, coots, sandpipers, jays, several flavors of crow.

I told myself that I possessed the rare kind of beauty only toads have, and I wanted to become one of them. I wanted my skin to be poisonous. I wanted to feast on slugs and ants with my sticky tongue, and above all, I wanted to be left alone.

The impact of fungal diseases is increasing across the world: Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health. As humans disperse disease-causing fungi, we create new opportunities for their evolution. Over the last fifty years, the most deadly disease ever recorded—a fungus that infects amphibians—has been spread around the world by human trade.

for some reason this metamorphosis didn’t occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians—when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature.

Then there was the night Mother and Father took us up to the roof to point out constellations and tell us their tales. Lucy kept interrupting them, telling them what scientists had discovered about the universe and how the stars in each constellation were actually billions of light years away from one another, so even though they looked close enough to make pictures, they most certainly were not. “And,” she said, “to top it off, whoever made up those constellations was obvious prejudiced against amphibians. There’s not even one up there!” So she decided to tell her own story about George the Great, who saved Lalverton from an infestation of giant man-eating slugs.

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.

Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next. The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends.

The necessary special effects are not in my possession, but what I’d like for you to imagine is Clementine’s white face coming close to mine, her sleepy eyes closing, her medicine-sweet lips puckering up, and all the other sounds of the world going silent—the rustling of our dresses, her mother counting leg lifts downstairs, the airplane outside making an exclamation mark in the sky—all silent, as Clementine’s highly educated, eight-year-old lips met mine. And then, somewhere below this, my heart reacting. Not a thump exactly. Not even a leap. But a kind of swish, like a frog kicking off from a muddy bank. My heart, that amphibian, moving that moment between two elements: one, excitement; the other, fear. I tried to pay attention. I tried to hold up my end of things. But Clementine was way ahead of me. She swiveled her head back and forth the way actresses did in the movies. I started doing the same, but out of the corner of her mouth she scolded, “You’re the man.” So I stopped. I stood stiffly with arms at my sides. Finally Clementine broke off the kiss. She looked at me blankly a moment, and then responded, “Not bad for your first time.

That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times.14 We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.

He had no desire to form attachments to people. That would have required more trust and intimacy than he could summon. But he did care for all the Hathaway brood, even Leo. And then there was Win, for whom Kev would have died a thousand times over. He would never degrade Win with his touch, or dare to assume a place in her life other than as a protector. She was too fine, too rare. As she grew into womanhood, every man in the county was enthralled by her beauty. Outsiders tended to view Win as an ice maiden, neat and unruffled and cerebral. But outsiders knew nothing of the sly wit and warmth that lurked beneath her perfect surface. Outsiders hadn't seen Win teaching Poppy the steps to a quadrille until they had both collapsed to the floor in giggles. Or frog-hunting with Beatrix, her apron filled with leaping amphibians. Or the droll way she read a Dickens novel with an array of voices and sounds, until the entire family howled at her cleverness. Kev loved her. Not in the way that novelists and poets described. Nothing so tame. He loved her beyond earth, heaven, or hell. Every moment out of her company was agony; every moment with her was the only peace he had ever known. Every touch of her hands left an imprint that ate down his soul. He would have killed himself before admitting it to anyone. The truth was buried deep within his heart.

We are each of us the result of billions of years of the universe evolving toward its own splendor. And evolution builds: the very mitochondria that power our cells and give us life once existed as separate organisms that first infected our pre–pre–human ancestors and then became one with them. We each contain not only the slime mold and the worm, the fish and amphibian and reptile, but the pig and the ape and the barely human. If we look hard enough, we can discern hundreds of parts: kings and queens, warriors and troubadours, mages, bullies, and saints. And hustlers, adventurers, survivors, rebels, reactionaries, and rogues. And the part of us that wants to be more than human, or rather more fully human. I believe that we need to enlist all these separate selves into a single army of free companions who respect each other and love each other to the death. And who are willing to devote their lives to fight together in order to win a shared splendor. I will return to this theme of integration again and again, for it is key to everything. All of my characters struggle with themselves, and face as well external obstacles such as exploding stars or dragons or icy wastelands cold enough to freeze the breath. Maram, who writes poems glorifying his second chakra (the body’s sexual center), pants like a dog after every enticing woman he sees. Even as he resists his essential nobility and destiny as a hero, he insists that every man deserves at least one vice. When it is pointed out to him that he also drinks, gambles, gluttonizes, and whores, he declares that he is still trying to decide which vice will be his.

Without warning, he fingered the small, black tattoo on her lower back. “What does this script mean?” She did gasp then, as much from the shock of his touch as from her visceral reaction to it. She wanted to arch up to his hand and couldn’t understand why. She snapped, “Are you done groping me?” “Canna say. Tell me what the marking means.” Mari had no idea. She’d had it ever since she could remember. All she knew was that her mother used to write out that mysterious lettering in all of her correspondence. Or, at least her mother had before she’d abandoned Mari in New Orleans to go on her two-hundred-year-long druid sabbatical— He tapped her there, impatiently awaiting an answer. “It means ‘drunk and lost a bet.’ Now keep your hands to yourself unless you want to be an amphibian.” When the opening emerged ahead, she crawled heedlessly for it and scrambled out with her lantern swinging wildly. She’d taken only three steps into the new chamber before he’d caught her wrist, spinning her around. As his gaze raked over her, he reached forward and pulled a lock of her long hair over her shoulder. He seemed unaware that he was languidly rubbing his thumb over the curl. “Why hide this face behind a cloak?” he murmured, cocking his head to the side as he studied her. “No’ a damn thing’s wrong with you that I can tell. But you look fey. Explains the name.” “How can I resist these suave compliments?” He was right about the name though. Many of the fey had names beginning in Mari or Kari. She gave his light hold on her hair a pointed look, and he dropped it like it was hot, then scowled at her as if she were to blame.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,

He proposed that new evolutionary features were added to the end stages in development; for example, amphibians arose by adding amphibian-specific features to the end stages of the development of a fish ancestor, reptile features to those of amphibians, and so on. Over time, according to Haeckel, this process resulted in embryonic development tracking evolutionary history.

Late in 1929, Julian, then in his early forties, became infatuated during his travels to eastern Africa with a nineteen-year-old American woman named Viola Ilma, to whom he made this alarming, if vaguely absurd declaration: “I shall conquer you with my mind". The ploy apparently worked, and in a letter home, Julian peremptorily informed his wife that they were now to have an open marriage.

and their ability to ventilate their lungs, amphibians developed a

Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex. And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey. Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window.

The Golden Guide to Pond Life, The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals, to Reptiles and Amphibians: humans are almost beside the point.

She said Frog eximplified transformation. He entered life in one form and left it in another. From egg to tadpole, to tadpole with legs, to amphibian with tail, to tailless frog, he was never the same. He began life in water, only emerging once he was his true self. He symbolized change, rebirth, and renewal, and his spirit could bring rain. Anna stared down at the ill-fated frog. The reservation was transforming…. And yet the very symbol of change had become a victim of it. The absurdity didn’t escape her.

Schmidt determined to file the outcomes that the dose of venom

One billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar. And then on the wall next to it: THE COSMIC CALENDAR Jan. 1: Big Bang May 1: Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy Sept. 9: Origin of the Solar System Sept. 14: Formation of the Earth Sept. 25: Origin of life on Earth Oct. 2: Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth Oct. 9: Date of the oldest fossils known to man Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms) Dec. 16: First worms Dec. 19: First fish Dec. 21: First insects Dec. 22: First amphibians Dec. 24: First dinosaurs Dec. 26: First mammals Dec. 27: First birds Dec. 29: First primates Dec. 30: First hominids Dec. 31: First humans On the blackboard, my mother had written: If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds. I copied this into my green notebook. My mother wiped the chalk off on her skirt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you did.

Creationists frequently taunt scientists by pointing to an image of something as specialized as a frog and saying that there is no way they could imagine a transitional fossil between frogs and other amphibians. But in 2008, a fossil was announced that put this question to rest (Anderson et al. 2008). Formally named Gerobatrachus hottoni, it was dubbed “frogamander” by the press because it had features of both frogs and salamanders (fig. 10.11). It had a long tail and salamander-like body, but its head is short with a rounded snout like that of a frog. It also had the large eyes and large eardrum found in frogs and not salamanders.

And so, as night chases the sun from Desert, Man moves, motionless, into the future, shaping the world and shaped by it, his presence defining Desert's stories as the stories define Desert. He moves as an amphibian killer destroys cities with dreams, slows as a regiment of artists raid history's corpse, stumbles as men lactate and machines are incarcerated for speaking the truth, dies as understanding deafens a world with whispers. His life shed in the storm of his own desire.

She opened the capers, green and freckled as amphibians, and with a teaspoon eased them from their brine. The olives were next, and she pushed pits from the aubergine-dark fruits, dropping their flesh into the tomato sauce. She ate as many as she added, and, as she stirred, she spat out the stones. The sauce bubbled, and the hob became flecked with red. Heat had started to rise in the kitchen, and she turned to the parsley, cool as morning grass. She chopped the herb to a finely mown darkness, her fingertips stained lawn-green when she pulled back, when she wiped the blade of her knife.

This means that amphibians have been around not just longer than mammals, say, or birds; they have been around since before there were dinosaurs. Most amphibians

Amphibians emerged at a time when all the land on earth was part of a single expanse known as Pangaea. Since the breakup of Pangaea, they’ve adapted to conditions on every continent except Antarctica. Worldwide, just over seven thousand species have been identified, and while the greatest number are found in the tropical rainforests, there are occasional amphibians, like the sandhill frog of Australia, that can live in the desert, and also amphibians, like the wood frog, that can live above the Arctic Circle.

and learned to peck at the keyboard with the elegance and speed of a badly burned amphibian, I imagined what might turn

Then the Frog Maiden, a scrawny old person dressed all in green for the occasion, stepped out in front of the crowd, muttering under her breath, a violent little pulse throbbing in the leathery sinews of her neck. Finally, the priest on the tower took the casket, opened it and emptied its four occupants out into the air. Unfortunately, there was a strong wind blowing at the time. This not only considerably dissipated their rate of descent but also blew them away from the place where they were supposed to fall. The crowd drew back, but not quickly enough. Two frogs landed in a bail of straw, one on Vlad’s head and another on my shoulder, all seemingly unhurt. Taking advantage of the confusion the four of them managed to skip away and were never seen again. Imagine the consternation that this unprecedented event caused. The Frog Maiden was canvassed for an opinion, but she was as confused as the rest; upon which doubts — ill-founded ones, I have no doubt — were immediately cast upon her virginity. The general consensus was that the omens were bad; though whether this was due more to the proximity of half a million Turks than the near miraculous escape of four small amphibians I could not say. ==========

Around the globe, species of every kind are dying out, silently, invisibly. At a very conservative estimate, they are dying out a thousand times faster than the rate of extinction before humans arose. At least half the tortoises and turtles, a third of the amphibians, a quarter of the mammals, and an eighth of the birds on this planet face a risk of extinction in the near future. What’s worse, these numbers apply only to the small fraction of known species whose conservation status has actually been assessed. The overall picture is likely to be much worse.

Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. Amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have genome sizes that range over two orders of magnitude, with some salamander genomes being 40 times larger than our own, and some frogs being less than a third of our size. If

Oxytocin is an ancient neurotransmitter chemical. Animal lineages much older than the mammals—amphibians, reptiles, worms, even the egg-dumping fish—all sport some version of it. For hundreds of millions of years animals have been practicing sexual reproduction. And for that long they’ve also needed a chemical pry-bar to push them into proximity. Why

Crime stories were paralleled in popularity by the occasional hoaxes the paper concocted. In August 1835 Day began publishing a series of articles recounting life on the moon—spherical amphibians rolling about—as supposedly revealed by a powerful new telescope.

amphibian fossils are so rare.

High up in the tree, the amphibian bounty hunter had been watching his targets without blinking.

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

All fish prior to Tiktaalik have a set of bones that attach the skull to the shoulder, so that every time the animal bent its body, it also bent its head. Tiktaalik is different. The head is completely free of the shoulder. This whole arrangement is shared with amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including us. The entire shift can be traced to the loss of a few small bones in a fish like Tiktaalik.

I just discovered that when you’re in a rain forest, where the density and diversity of wildlife are the greatest, you will always hear critters entering the soundscape each day in a structured order, almost as if following Darwin’s timeline of evolution: insects first, then amphibians, then reptiles, then birds, then mammals. If

when you’re in a rain forest, where the density and diversity of wildlife are the greatest, you will always hear critters entering the soundscape each day in a structured order, almost as if following Darwin’s timeline of evolution: insects first, then amphibians, then reptiles, then birds, then mammals.

Thus it is that four strangers sit in the red chairs, strip off their socks, plunge their feet into the ink-baths, and hold hands under an amphibian stare. This is the first act of anyone entering Palimpsest: Orlande will take your coats, sit you down, and make you family. She will fold you four together like Quartos. She will draw you each a card—look, for you it is the Broken Ship reversed, which signifies Perversion, a Long Journey without Enlightenment, Gout—and tie your hands together with red yarn. Wherever you go in Palimpsest, you are bound to these strangers who happened onto Orlande’s salon just when you did, and you will go nowhere, eat no capon or dormouse, drink no oversweet port that they do not also taste, and they will visit no whore that you do not also feel beneath you, and until that ink washes from your feet—which, given that Orlande is a creature of the marsh and no stranger to mud, will be some time—you cannot breathe but that they breathe also.

We weep for characters, and then we go brush our teeth and have to face the fact that the world is warming at such a rapid pace that a terrifying number of amphibians are vanishing every month. And so through plays, through soccer games, through novels, through movies, through video games, through political elections - through story - we rehearse feelings we might eventually need in our own lives. ... Through drama, in the moments of greatest suspense, when the hero is hanging by a support from above, swaying to and fro ... we rehearse anxiety and longing more profoundly than any other emotions. ... And longing is the reach, the extension, the wild desire to attain the next stable platform at the end of the high wire. It's the hope against hope that the water shooting out of the fountain will stay aloft forever. (Anthony Doerr, "The Sword of Damocles: On Suspense, Shower Murders, and Shooting People on the Beach")

There is strong geological evidence that the period from 380 million to 365 million years ago is the critical time. The younger rocks in that range, those about 360 million years old, include diverse kinds of fossilized animals that we would all recognize as amphibians or reptiles ... But in rocks that are about 385 million years old, we find whole fish that look like, well, fish ... it is probably no great surprise that we should focus on rocks about 375 million years old to find evidence of the transition between fish and land-living animals.

Our hundreds of useless olfactory genes are left over from mammal ancestors who relied more heavily on the sense of smell to survive ... Our genes are similar to primates’, less similar to other mammals’, less similar still to reptiles’, amphibians’, fishes’, and so on.

In The Frog Prince, a beautiful princess drops her golden ball into a deep spring and must allow a frog into her bedroom to get it back, maturing thereby into a woman. Fairy tales and myth often place an odd creature on the path of the hero to signal an opportunity exists: turn right for good or left for evil. Of all the harbingers of change in fairy tales and myth—disfigured dwarfs, shriveled witches, even Yoda—it is reptiles (and amphibians) that are considered ugly enough without embellishment to awaken the part of the brain that listens to fairy tales. In real life, it is possible that reptiles have the power to switch off a person’s thinking brain and switch on the subconscious, opening the door to a person’s most deeply suppressed passions. Perhaps this is what makes reptiles so terrifying. Coiled at the center of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word fascinate is this: “of a serpent.” Evolved from lizards, deliverers of venom—snakes are the villains of the animal kingdom. And yet, throughout history, snakes have been recognized for their power to bewitch man, to deprive him of resistance, to draw him near.

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 'the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.' In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms. The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.

Dressed in jeans and black Keds, Rebecca wore a Giant Monkey Frog T-shirt. Under the image of a grotesque-looking Peruvian amphibian perched precariously on a tree branch, the shirt’s slogan read “Licking This Frog May Make You Crazy.” She had purchased the shirt twenty years ago when the Phyllomedusa bicolor species was endangered. Now it was extinct.

No journey’s harder than the one in your head. Amphibian,

Let the powers that be warm the path you will tread; No journey’s harder than the one in your head. Amphibian, “Cloud Path,” Rainmaker

He reached for the weapon on his right hip. It was a Ruger Mark 2 Amphibian, a stainless steel .22 caliber rim fire pistol with an integral suppressor. But

She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that's neither here nor there.

What good the science that destroys itself? What purpose in awakening every morning for a wearisome daily struggle to reach the evening in a state of exhaustion, to reach the agony of such an empty life?...As long as cerebral intelligence governs the world, it will be dominated by beings of inferior mentality, for man’s life will be but struggle of force and power, struggle of vanity, struggle of wealth, struggle for an existence whose aim is warped…But man is not a beast; he is animated. Man is an epitome of the cosmos, a creature housing the divine spark. Man is not an evolved amphibian, an animal form that became what we are. Man is perfect at his origin, a divine being who has degenerated into what we are – R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (Egyptian Miracle) As we have mentioned throughout our works,

Life on this planet has always been a balancing act—a complex web of interconnectivity that’s surprisingly fragile. Remove or even alter enough key components and that web begins to fray and fall apart. Such a collapse—or mass extinction—has happened five times in our planet’s geological past. The first struck four hundred million years ago, when most marine life died off. The third event hit both land and sea at the end of the Permian Period, wiping out 90 percent of the world’s species, coming within a razor’s edge of ending all life on earth. The fifth and most recent extinction took out the dinosaurs, ushering in the era of mammals and altering the world forever. How close are we to seeing such an event happen again? Some scientists believe we’re already there, neck-deep in a sixth mass extinction. Every hour, three more species go extinct, totaling over thirty thousand a year. Worst of all, the rate of this die-off is continually rising. At this very moment, nearly half of all amphibians, a quarter of all mammals, and a third of all reefs balance at the edge of extinction. Even a third of all conifer trees teeter at that brink. Why is this happening? In the past, such massive die-offs had been triggered by sudden changes in global climate or shifts in plate tectonics, or in the case of the dinosaurs, possibly even an asteroid strike. Yet most scientists believe this current crisis has a simpler explanation: humans. Through our trampling of the environment and rise in pollution, mankind has been the driving force behind the loss of most species. According to a report by Duke University released in May 2014, human activity has driven species into extinction at the rate a thousandfold faster than before the arrival of modern man.

Uncounted species--not just charismatic animals like tigers, gorillas, rhinos, and saola but an even larger number of obscure rodents, amphibians, birds, and reptiles--have been pressed to the brink. We hardly know them, and yet within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth's biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age.

Salamanders are so very much the "other," cold, slimy creatures verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens. Their startling otherness makes it all the more remarkable that we were here tonight in their defense. Amphibians offer few of the warm fuzzy feelings that fuel our protection of charismatic mammals that look back at us with Bambi's grateful eyes. They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.

only sport known to have inspired an indignant left-wing poem. It was written by one Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn in 1915. The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play. Just show me an indignant left-wing poem about softball or bungee jumping. And our local mill has been converted to a shopping mall, so the kids are still there. Golf is also the only sport God is known to play. God and Saint Peter are out on Sunday morning. On the first hole God drives into a water hazard. The waters part and God chips onto the green. On the second hole God takes a tremendous whack and the ball lands ten feet from the pin. There’s an earthquake, one side of the green rises up, and the ball rolls into the cup. On the third hole God lands in a sand trap. He creates life. Single-cell organisms develop into fish and then amphibians. Amphibians crawl out of the ocean and evolve into reptiles, birds, and furry little mammals. One of those furry little mammals runs into the sand trap, grabs God’s ball in its mouth, scurries over, and drops it in the hole. Saint Peter looks at God and says, “You wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around?” And golf courses are beautiful. Many people think mature men have no appreciation for beauty except in immature women. This isn’t true, and, anyway, we’d rather be playing golf. A golf course is a perfect example of Republican male aesthetics—no fussy little flowers, no stupid ornamental shrubs, no exorbitant demands for alimony, just acre upon acre of lush green grass that somebody else has to mow. Truth, beauty, and even poetry are to be found in golf. Every man, when he steps up to the tee, feels, as Keats has it … Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. That is, the men were silent. Cortez was saying, “I can get on in two, easy. A three-wood drive, a five-iron from the fairway, then a two-putt max. But if I hook it, shit, I’m in the drink.” EAT THE RICH

Their extended evolutionary history means that even groups of amphibians that, from a human perspective, seem to be fairly similar may, genetically speaking, be as different from one another as, say, bats are from horses.

all this riotous back and forth? Or had we only invoked alarm, amphibian for get-back! get-back! I didn’t know. But how happy we were, for that hour, to believe we were one marvelous body, in our smooth and slippery skin. Even if the frogs did not want us. Even if our joint fates are written, already, in the tainted water, the dark and opulent mud.

Such an intermediate form between egg and adult that is capable of independent life is known as a larva. All insects except the most simple and primitive pass through such a stage of development during their lives and often exploit it by drawing upon two different food sources during the course of their lives, one as a larva and the other as an adult. Amphibians are the only group of backboned animals to have such a stage in their life history. Interestingly, the newly hatched larvae of salamanders are indistinguishable to the naked eye from the hatchlings of the Queensland lungfish.

Many amphibian eggs are black with the pigment melanin that protects their delicate cells from damage by ultra-violet light. Newt eggs, however, are white and lack pigment so they need protection of leaves.

I walked the Eleven to set my piece on the Hawk Nest.

There are, of course, the famous descriptions of two such monsters from the Old Testament, Behemoth and Leviathan (Job 40:15-41:34), Behemoth being a giant vegetarian that lived on the fens, and Leviathan a somewhat more terrifying armour-plated amphibian whom only children and the most foolhardy would want as a pet. The Egyptians knew Behemoth by the name p'ih mw,1 which is the same name, of course. Leviathan was similarly known as Lotan to the men of Ugarit.2

Only a slight reddening of the older woman’s face suggested she was in any way pained to discuss amphibians in polite company.

And there, seated at the heart of all that sumptuousness and leaning forward in his chair behind the great desk, was a figure that looked like nothing so much as a dapper but exceedingly despondent frog. The very shape of his head seemed as if it had been altered by a powerful vertical vice, resulting in a symmetrical ovoid with a horizontal polar axis. His complexion was not so much sallow as lightly green. His mouth was unnaturally wide, with thick, tautly stretched lips the color and texture of earthworms. What ears he had were small and circular and somewhat recessed. His nose was broad and rather flat, as if it had been spread on his face unevenly by a butter knife, and had what looked more like nares than full nostrils. The sparse, slick tendrils of his hair were of some murkily nondescript hue and clung unguinously to his scalp. The dense convex lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles made it seem as if his greenish-gray eyes were peering out at the world from the bottom of a shallow pond, through a thin layer of algae. If he had a jawline, it was not immediately evident where he kept it. His hunched, narrow, rounded shoulders, moreover, amplified the amphibian quality of his appearance. He was, however, dressed in the height of fashion: a high collar and pearl-colored cravat, a waistcoat of forest-green velvet, and a formal coat of lighter, lettuce-green damask with lapels of cream-white satin with pink borders.

Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They

Dr. Burroughs couldn’t believe that human footprints could even potentially be found in 300 million-year-old sediment (by humanistic evolutionary reckoning). So, based on his religious assumptions, he believed the prints must’ve been made by an animal that had human-like feet and walked in a stride like humans. The problem is that there are no animals that have feet like humans and strides like a human. So, as an arbitrary speculation, he proposed that an unknown giant bipedal (“walked on two-feet”) amphibian made the prints.

mostly the park was a humid, stinking wetlands of reptiles and amphibians croaking from the muck.

In Zadeh’s math, we can say “This animal belongs 90% to the fish family and 10% to the amphibian family.” “This animal belongs 60% to the ape family and 40% to the hominid family.” See? Just like the Coke can contains 60 % coke and 40% air. I told you I wouldn’t leave us wandering in the dark with the Fundamentalists . . .

In those days, the ancient rainforests spread from Northern California to southeastern Alaska in a band between the mountains and the sea. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture-laden air from the pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world. Trees that were born before Columbus sailed. And trees are just the beginning. The numbers of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects are staggering. It's hard to write without running out of superlatives, for these were among the greatest forests on earth, forests peopled with centuries of past lives, enormous logs and snags that foster more life after their death than before. The canopy is a multi-layered sculpture of vertical complexity from the lowest moss on the forest floor to the wisps of lichen hanging high in the treetops, raggedy and uneven from the gaps produced by centuries of windthrow, disease, and storms. This seeming chaos belies the tight web of inter-connections between them all, stitched with filaments of fungi, silk of spiders, and silver threads of water. Alone is a word without meaning in this forest.

Mike walked about the cavernous basement, alarmed at the serious mould infestation and even more perturbed by the slithering amphibians gathering at his feet. Mike traced the black splotches of mould that took him to a blind spot behind the infinite staircase which was very quickly becoming the stairway to Hell.

Soon after the Gordons left, Frank and Joe gave Aunt Gertrude a final hug and set off for the airport with their father. Their route included Toronto, then over a vast, lonely, region, splashed with lakes and carpeted with spruce. The plane landed briefly at Sudbury, where the boys glimpsed the white domes of a radar station standing out against the night sky. Two hours after leaving Toronto, they set down near the rugged mining town of Timmins. They registered at a hotel for the night and arranged by telephone for a bush pilot to fly them on to Lake Okemow. At daybreak the two sleuths were up and breakfasting on a hearty meal of Canadian bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes. Then they taxied off in a four-seater amphibian. The flight proved to be bumpy. Below lay a dense wilderness of black spruce, poplar, birch, and tamarack. Glittering lakes and snakelike streams slashed the forest. Farther north came barren patches, frosted white with snow. Then again they were flying over heavy timber. “Here we are!” the pilot said at last. He brought the plane down to a choppy landing on the not-yet-frozen lake and taxied to a wooden pier. On the shore lay the stout log hunting lodge. Smoke feathered from its chimney.

You watch, listen, talk, sniff and wonder. You are there as a thinking, experiencing creature, and so you take notice. At the same time, you are in the presence of other thinking, experiencing creatures. You are noticed.” “..and there are all the ordinary living things—the trees, birds, insects, marsupials and mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, trees, shrubs, grasses. To some of these you are related. So, you are in the presence of your relations, and thus you are enmeshed in reciprocities, obligations, benefits and shared objectives. You are not alone.

Why did Dodgson just stand there like that? That's not the way to act around predators. You get caught around lions, you make a lot of noise, wave your hands around, throw things at them. Try to scare them off. You don't just stand there." "He probably read the wrong research paper. There's been a theory going around that tyrannosaurs can only see movement. A guy named Roxton made casts of rex braincases, and concluded tyrannosaurs had the brain of a frog." "Roxton is an idiot. He doesn't know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife. His paper was a joke." "What paper?" "Roxton believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn't see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defence of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could.

The bones of the mammalian middle ear are like those of no other animal: mammals have three bones, whereas reptiles and amphibians have only one. Fish have none at all.

This is very different from mice and humans, as we saw in the last chapter. For us and our rodent relatives, the only way to generate live young is by having DNA from both a mother and a father. It’s tempting to speculate that stick insects are highly unusual but they’re not. We mammals are the exceptions. Insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles and even birds all have a few species that can reproduce parthenogenetically. It’s we mammals who can’t. It’s our class in the animal kingdom which is the odd one out, so it makes sense to ask why this is the case.

Pikaia is now regarded as the most likely common ancestor of fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals.

All Greencloaks spoke to their spirit animals, but Maya was holding what appeared to be an intense one-sided conversation with an amphibian!

God is not a robot. He isn’t a comptroller of an accounting company trying to make things add up or work out. He is a being full of deep emotion, longing, and memories of what it used to be like. The incarnation therefore isn’t about an equation but about remembering what home used to be like and making a plan to get back there. Consider this reboot of the Genesis creation account. It may help you see God’s emotion a little better. First off, nothing … but God. No light, no time, no substance, no matter. Second off, God says the word and WHAP! Stuff everywhere! The cosmos in chaos: no shape, no form, no function—just darkness … total. And floating above it all, God’s Holy Spirit, ready to play. Day one: Then God’s voice booms out, “Lights!” and, from nowhere, light floods the skies and “night” is swept off the scene. God gives it the big thumbs up, calls it “day”. Day two: God says, “I want a dome—call it ‘sky’—right there between the waters above and below.” And it happens. Day three: God says, “Too much water! We need something to walk on, a huge lump of it—call it ‘land’. Let the ‘sea’ lick its edges.” God smiles, says, “Now we’ve got us some definition. But it’s too plain! It needs colour! Vegetation! Loads of it. A million shades. Now!” And the earth goes wild with trees, bushes, plants, flowers and fungi. “Now give it a growth permit.” Seeds appear in every one. “Yesss!” says God. Day four: “We need a schedule: let’s have a ‘sun’ for the day, a ‘moon’ for the night; I want ‘seasons’, ‘years’; and give us ‘stars’, masses of stars—think of a number, add a trillion, then times it by the number of trees and we’re getting there: we’re talking huge! Day five: “OK, animals: amoeba, crustaceans, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals … I want the whole caboodle teeming with a million varieties of each—and let’s have some fun with the shapes, sizes, colours, textures!” God tells them all, “You’ve got a growth permit—use it!” He sits back and smiles, says, “Result!” Day six: Then God says, “Let’s make people—like us, but human, with flesh and blood, skin and bone. Give them the job of caretakers of the vegetation, game wardens of all the animals.” So God makes people, like him, but human. He makes male and female.… He smiles at them and gives them their job description: “Make babies! Be parents, grandparents, great-grandparents—fill the earth with your families and run the planet well. You’ve got all the plants to eat from, so have all the animals—plenty for all. Enjoy.” God looks at everything he’s made, and says, “Fantastic. I love it!” Day seven: Job done—the cosmos and the earth complete. God takes a bit of well-earned R&R and just enjoys. He makes an announcement: “Let’s keep this day of the week special, a day off—battery-recharge day: Rest Day.”2 I’m not normally a paraphrase guy, but we always read the creation story like a textbook. I love this rendition because it captures the enthusiastic emotion that God felt about everything He created, especially humans. He loved it all. He loved us. Most of all, He loved the way things were.

1. We crave meaty taste because the amphibian brain's hunger for flesh is older than the primate brain's "acquired taste" for fruits and nuts. 2. As it influenced the pursuit, handling, and killing of game, the amygdala also stimulated the release of digestive juices in preparation for eating the kill. Thus, today, hidden aggressiveness in the meat-eater's code makes a sizzling steak more exciting than a bowl of fruit. This explains, in part, why (when possible and affordable) meals throughout the world are planned around a meat dish.

The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock are usually devoid of visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before, making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening - we can imagine - for the sounds of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a burden on the wind. Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It's a strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night, after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under the frog's chin swells like a bubble, then collapses. Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for the joy in the common life. Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kitfoxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.

Another extraordinary similarity concerns the presence of Seven Sages in both the Sumerian and Vedic traditions. Most ancient societies, I concede, had their sages or seers or wise men -- in India they were, and still are, called rishis. But it seems to me to be stretching coincidence too far to find a group specifically named the 'Seven Sages' prominently associated with two separate ancient cultures and to imagine that this did not come about through some sort of connection. In the case of Sumer the Seven Sages were depicted as amphibian, 'fish-garbed' beings who emerged from the sea in antediluvian times to teach wisdom to mankind. In the case of the Vedas the focus is not on the antediluvian period but on the flood itself and those antediluvians who are claimed to have survived it, namely Manu and the Seven Sages.

Removing his shoes, knotting the laces together, and stringing them around his neck, Horst rose from the cold, black water like a primeval amphibian with aspirations towards dapperness assaying a first journey onto land to spread the word about good tailoring.

things we could not use in our speeches. Saws … amphibians … fire … peanut butter and socks—don’t ask! … ropes … pudding …

In 2018, a newly discovered blind and burrowing amphibian was officially named Dermophis donaldtrumpi, in recognition of the US president’s climate change denial.

As also noted by Morris, empirical data from various lineages of fish and amphibians have shown, for instance, that more plastic clades tend to be more speciose than sister taxa of similar age but with less plasticity, due to a combination of greater opportunities to diversify and augmented evolvability of plastic features and thus of decreased risk of extinction. In addition, empirical studies show that even populations that derive from ancestors that were particularly overspecialized for a certain, very specific way of life, including parasitism, have successfully changed their behavior by becoming non-parasitic and displaying a morphology that is substantially different from that of their ancestors as seen for example in lamprey evolution. Morris argued that random variations arising in a population may decrease plasticity and that the plastically changed phenotype linked with the behavioral shift may be negatively affected. Therefore, these variants will be likely eliminated by selection, whereas variants that decrease plasticity in the direction of the plastic change will tend to be selected and spread through the population. This may lead to a situation in which the phenotype might appear similar across generations, but its plasticity is actually increasingly reduced until an environmental shift will no longer provoke phenotypic changes. As noted by Morris, Baldwin allowed for other non-mutually exclusive scenarios to occur, such as the rise of variants that increase plasticity in general, thus increasing the ‘fit’ between organisms and their environment and the degree to which evolution could be directed, thus leading to evolutionary trends.

Dangerous hands. Jeryn recalled them against her mouth, her fingers rubbing her lips. An indication that her blisters had been hurting her. The vision sidetracked him to the point where he neglected to intervene in her drinking, to insist that he test it first. Sidetracked? How disgraceful of a physician. Having a cowardly amphibian escort him here had been insulting enough. Having the lips and hands of a fool girl distract Jeryn was unforgivable. He did not get distracted by anyone. By anything.

Pirahãs eat fish, bananas, wild game, grubs, Brazil nuts, electric eels, otters, caimans, insects, rats — any sort of protein, oil, starch, sugar, or other foodstuff they can hunt, fish, or gather from their environment — though they avoid reptiles and amphibians, for the most part.

resemble paleontology.” Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.

What good came of all this exploration? It was a question philosophes found irresistable. Progress was their almost irresistable answer. But Diderot, the secular pontiff of the Enlightenment, the editor of the Encyclopédie, did not agree. In 1773 he wrote a denunciation of explorers as agents of a new kind of barbarism. Base motives drove them: 'tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiousity, I know not what restlessness of spirit, the desire to know and the desire to see, boredom, the dislike of familiar pleasures' - all the baggage of the restless temperament. Lust for discovery was a new form of fanaticism on the part of men seeking 'islands to ravage, people to despoil, subjugate and massacre.' The explorers discovered people morally superior to themselves, because more natural or more civilized, while they, on their side, grew in savagery, far from the polite restraints that reined them in at home. 'All the long-range expeditions,' Diderot insisted, 'have reared a new generation of nomadic savages ... men who visit so many countries that they end by belonging to none ... amphibians who live on the surface of the waters,' deracinated, and, in the strictest sense of the word, demoralized. Certainly, the excesses explorers committed - of arrogance, of egotism, of exploitation - showed the folly of supposing that travel necessarily broadens the mind or improves the character. But Diderot exaggerated. Even as he wrote, the cases of disinterested exploration - for scientific or altruistic purposes - were multiplying. If the eighteenth century rediscovered the beauties of nature and the wonders of the picturesque, it was in part because explorers alerted domestic publics to the grandeurs of the world they discovered. If the conservation of species and landscape became, for the first time in Western history, an objective of imperial policy, it was because of what the historian Richard Grove has called 'green imperialism' - the awakened sense of stewardship inspired by the discovery of new Edens in remote oceans. If philosophers enlarged their view of human nature, and grappled earnestly and, on the whole, inclusively with questions about the admissability of formerly excluded humans - blacks, 'Hottentots,' Australian Aboriginals, and all other people estranged by their appearance or culture - to full membership of the moral community, it was because exploration made these brethren increasingly familiar. If critics of Western institutions were fortified in their strictures and encouraged in their advocacy of popular sovreignty, 'enlightened despotism,' 'free thinking,' civil liberties, and human 'rights,' it was, in part, because exploration acquainted them with challenging models from around the world of how society could be organized and life lived.

Today as the climate crisis begins to bite and the swelling numbers of the most populous mammal on the planet—7.8 billion people—continues to grow some recognize that it is our ever-expanding human works and vast mechanized agriculture that have flattened the wilderness and introduced us to ever-new micro-organisms, while in the last fifty years more than half of the bird, mammal and amphibian populations have dwindled into memory or teeter on the edge of the extinction cliff. It is our species that seems deranged in its blind despoliations of the natural world. It is we humans who disturb millennia of secluded species with our religions, societies and agricultures, we who bring animals and their viruses out of their remote habitats and into our markets and kitchens. These days Stilgoe’s beast that snuffles about in the human unconsciousness is among us—by invitation.

If you ever meet a talking frog—any chatty amphibian, really—my advice would be to ignore it.

I’m an amphibian. I’m not illiterate.

It was hard for her, but after groping around for a moment, she found the words hiding in a corner, trying to avoid her. "I wish," she said, seizing hold of them, "that you wouldn't do that. Get married. To someone else." "Oh?" He blinked. "Do you really?" "I mean, I'm sure they are very nice. The princesses." "I believe it's part of the job description," Charlie said. "Like... have you heard of the things they do in stories? Resuscitate amphibians? Notice for parents that their children have wet the bed? One would have to be relatively kind to do these services." "Yes" Tress said. "I…” She took a deep breath. "I would still...rather you didn't marry one of them." "Well then, I shan't, Charlie said. “I don’t believe you have a choice, Charlie. Your father wants you married. It's politics." “Ah, but you see, I have a secret weapon." He took her hands and leaned in. Behind, his father moved up to the prow of the ship and looked down, scowling. Charlie, however, smiled a lopsided smile. His "look how sneaky I am" smile. He used it when he wasn't being particularly sneaky. "What... kind of secret weapon, Charlie?" she asked. "I can be incredibly boring." "That's not a weapon." "It might not be one in a war, Tress," he said. "But in courtship? It is as fine a weapon as the sharpest rapier. You know how I go on. And on. And on." "I like how you go on, Charlie. I don't mind the on, in fact. I sometimes quite enjoy the on." "You are a special case," Charlie said. "You are ... well, this is kind of silly... but you're like a pair of gloves, Tress." "I am?" she said, choking up. "Yes. Don't be offended. I mean, when I have to practice the sword, I wear these gloves and—" "I understand," she whispered. From atop the ship, Charlie's father shouted for him to be quick. Tress realized then that—like Charlie had different kinds of smiles-his father had different kinds of scowls. She didn't much like what the current one implied about her. Charlie squeezed her hands. "Listen, Tress. I promise you. I'm not going to get married. I'm going to go to those kingdoms, and I'm going to be so insufferably boring that none of the girls will have me. "I'm not good at much. I've never scored a single point against my father in sparring. I spill my soup at formal dinners. I talk so much, even my footman—who is paid to listen— comes up with creative reasons to interrupt me. The other day I was telling him the story of the fish and the gull, and he pretended to stub his toe, and.." The duke shouted again. "I can do this, Tress" Charlie insisted. "I will do this.

Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet. All of these newbies were thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield. It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant. After all, they were small and meek creatures, nowhere near the top of the food chain during their earliest years. They were hanging around with lots of other species of small-to-midsize reptiles, early mammals, and amphibians in the middle of the food pyramid, fearful of the crocodile-line archosaurs, who held the throne. Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it.

In Siberian tradition the udha is responsible for the acquisition of power animals. Power animals are spirits that take on the form and characteristics of a certain animal. A power animal may be a mammal, bird, reptile, fish, amphibian, even an invertebrate such as an insect or spider (although the most common power animals seem to be mammals or birds). These animal spirits act as the collective consciousness of the species they represent and possess great magical power.

Salamanders are so very much the 'other,' cold, slimy creatures verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens. Their startling otherness makes it all the more remarkable that we were here tonight in their defence. Amphibians offer few of the warm fuzzy feelings that fuel our protection of charismatic mammals that look back at us with Bambi's grateful eyes. They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.

From his attic of dreams, from his tower of ivory and spleen, the morose impressionist saw unrolling beneath him a double lane of light, tall poles, bearing twy-electric lamps, either side of nocturnal Madison Avenue, throwing patches of metallic blue upon the glistening damp pave - veritable fragments of shivering luminosity; saw the interminable stretch of humid asphalt stippled by rare notes of dull crimson; exigent lanterns of some fat citizen contractor. Occasional trolley-cars, projecting vivid shafts of canary colour into the mist, traversed with vertiginous speed and hollow thunder the dreary roadway. It was now midnight. On the street were buttresses of granite; at unryhthmic intervals gloomy apartment-houses reared to the clouds their oblong ugliness, attracting by their magnetism the vagrom winds which tease, agitate, and buffet unfortunate ones afoot in this melancholy cañon of marble, steam, and steel. A huge, belated, bug-like motor-car, its antennæ vibrating with fire, slipped tremulously through the casual pools of shadowed cross-lights; swam and hummed so softly that it might have been mistaken for a novel, timorous, amphibian monster, neither boat nor machine. To the faded nerves of the fantastic impressionist aloft in his ineluctable cage this undulating blur of blue and grey and frosty white, these ebon silhouettes of hushed brassy palaces, and the shimmering wet night did but evoke the exasperating tableau of a petrified Venice. Venice overtaken by a drought eternal; an aerial Venice with cliff-dwellers in lieu of harmonious gondoliers; a Venice of tarnished twilights, in which canals were transposed to the key of stone; across which trailed and dripped superficial rain from dusk and implacable skies; rain upright and scowling. And the soul of the poet ironically posed its own acid pessimism in the presence of this salty, chill, and cruel city — a Venice of receded seas, a spun-iron Venice, sans hope, sans faith, sans vision.

The earliest reptiles look remarkably amphibian-like, and the earliest mammals are actually known informally as the “reptile-like mammals.

The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks." [From The Screwtape Letters, witten in the percpective of "a tempter."]

Earth formed on January 1. Life evolved in mid-February (around 4,000 million years ago), but there would have been nothing that was visible without a microscope until the ancestors of worms, jellyfish, and corals evolved on about November 13. Plants moved onto land around November 24 and amphibians on December 3. Reptiles evolved from amphibians during the first week of December. Dinosaurs and early mammals had evolved from reptiles by December 13, but the dinosaurs — which survived for 160 million years — were gone by Boxing Day (December 26). Primates evolved a day or so later (December 27), and humans from Asia first stepped foot into the western hemisphere at about two minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve.