Crossword-Solution: AMPHIBIA 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

There are three living orders: (1) The tailless, as the frogs (Anura); (2) The tailed (Urodela), as the salamanders, and the siren group (Sirenoidea), which retain the gills of the young state (hence called Perennibranchiata) through the adult state, among which are the siren, proteus, etc.; (3) The C?cilians, or serpentlike Amphibia (Ophiomorpha or Gymnophiona), with minute scales and without limbs.

One or more pairs of these arches persist in amphibia and reptiles, but only one arch in birds and mammals, this being on the right side in the former, and on the left in the latter.

Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an infinity of flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like the low blowing of numberless little tin horns, the clanking of billions of little bells;--and, at intervals, profound tones, vibrant and heavy, as of a bass viol--the orchestra of the great frogs! And interweaving with it all, one continuous shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--the stridulous telegraphy of crickets.

That of birds (104 to 105.4 degrees) is higher than that of quadrupeds (98.5 to 100.4 degrees), or than that of fishes or amphibia, whose proper temperature is from 3.7 to 2.6 degrees higher than that of the medium in which they live.

The essential identity of all the Mammals in point of anatomical structure and embryonic development--in spite of their astonishing differences in external appearance and habits of life--is so palpably significant that modern zoologists are agreed in the hypothesis that they have all sprung from a common root, and that this root may be sought in the earlier Palaeozoic Amphibia.