do dragons look better with or without the end thing on their tails?
813612
That depends on the Dragon they don't suit all of them.
3478
Cimpanzees and most of the higher primates have no tails.  It seems that somewhere along the evolutionary marathon tails got discarded, but it was relatively recently....
958862
That is so wierd! I had the same experience, the dragons were probably different than your's though. And my zodiac is not the dragon. My dragons were different to each other too. One was a blue western(or english) dragon. The other was a green-to-red from head to tail and it was an eastern(or chinese) dragon. I was about 6 years old. I was in my room sitting on my bed with the window open. I was staring out the window and I look away for a few seconds, and when I look back these two dragons crawled into my room. And no they weren't lizards, I don't live anywhere near where lizards can live. Oh well, so while they were crawling in they were talking, like your dragons. Only these ones were talking to me and it was like I understood. But they were talking in some other language, an ancient language I suppose. Then my mom called me, I turned around and told her I was coming. When I looked back I just saw the tail of the blue dragon exit through the window. I only saw them once more. I saw the chinese dragon two years ago in the summer.  But that was the last time. And I also did not tell anyone for fear of being considered crazy, a freak, or something else I can't think of right now. Oh well, there's my experience. Hope it did something.\n\nAlso many believe that Dragons are the ultimate creatures. It is said they are in tune with all elements. They are the strongest, wisest, the ugliest or most beautiful, etc. Basically the best of everything. But also the most secretive.
178402
Mmm... there are many kinds of legless lizards. I don't know where you live, but if it looked like its tail was missing, then it _was_ a lizard, because snakes do not autotomize their tails. Another good detail is if it looked like it had eyelids. Snakes don't have mobile eyelids, but snake-like lizards do.\n\nDid it look anything like this?\nhttp://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/f/f6/200px-Anguidae.jpg\nhttp://homepage.mac.com/jmdelacre/.cv/jmdelacre/Sites/.Pictures/reptiles-geniez/Chalcides-minutus2-web.jpg-thumb_269_202.jpg\n\nI'll check back :-)\n-------------------\nI'm back! Hey, that's great. If what you saw is indeed an Anguidae, the common name is "glass lizard" (glass, because they seem fragile, as they autotomize their tails really easily).\nThe most common species in Florida seem to belong to genus Ophisaurus. I suggest you do an image search using the genus name, you'll probably find the right species.\nOh, glass lizards are not dangerous, but they can bite!\nSee description of common Florida lizards here:\nhttp://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/UW061\nThis species is common:\nhttp://www.wildherps.com/species/O.ventralis.html
24368
Yes.\nI initially was going to talk about the Komodos from Indonesia, and also about crocodiles and alligators, but the best most interesting answer is here:\n\nhttp://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/redmond/23/dragon.html\n\nI do not copy the material as to not plagerize their material, but well worth checking out on this concept.
311607
No.\n\nIf you examine the representations of dragons over time, you can watch them change.  European dragons become increasingly snake-like in their description, until the earliest descriptions are essentially exaggerated traveller's tales of large African snakes.  Fire breathing wasn't added until much later, after dragons came to be identified with Satan in mideval mythology.\n\nChinese dragons are based on the Chinese alligators.  When the alligators exhale, they sometimes blow out a mist of water left in their nostrils, looking like a little cloud.  This was included in pictures of the alligators and the "celestial" alligators of Chinese mythology.  (Basically, all animals had a magical counterpart.)  Pictures of the clouds became exaggerated over time, as the body of the "dragons" became longer.\n\nNumerous animals have been called dragons (leafy sea dragons, komodo dragons, bearded dragons, dragonflies, etc.) but those were all named for the dragon myths, not vice-versa.
431352
Snakes lost their legs on land, not in the sea as previous scientists thought, according to new research by professor of biology S. Blair Hedges and postdoctoral fellow Nicolas Vidal.\n\n"Everyone agrees that snakes evolved from lizards and are close relatives to lizards," Hedges said. "What is controversial is the specific group, whether on the land or in the sea."\n\nScientists estimate that snakes evolved 150 million years ago, Vidal said. For many years, they believed in the terrestrial or land theory, which says that snakes evolved from lizards that burrowed underground.\n\nThen, seven years ago, the discovery of a fossilized marine snake with tiny hind legs fueled the marine hypothesis that snakes lost their legs in the sea. The marine snakes called mosasaurs are now extinct, but their closest cousins, the monitor lizards such as the Komodo Dragon, are still alive today.\n\nHedges and Vidal chose two genes and compared them in lizards and snakes to see how closely they are related. From statistical analysis of these gene sequences, they created a family tree.\n\n"These two genes have accumulated different mutations in the different species," Vidal said. "These differences between the species are used to build the evolutionary trees. Snakes are not closely related to the monitor lizards, which means that they cannot have marine origins."\n\nHedges and Vidal's research is significant because of the comprehensive scope of the snakes and lizards studied. They collected DNA from 64 species representing all 19 families of living lizards and 17 of the 25 families of living snakes, Vidal said.\n\n"We mostly acquired DNA from the soft tissues, blood, shed skin, scales and tips of the tails of the animals," he said. "A very small amount is needed, so we can get the sample without killing the animal."\n\nHedges and Vidal acquired samples from other colleagues, their own collections, fieldwork in South America and pet stores that trade exotic animals, Hedges said.\n\nSome of the samples were difficult to acquire because some snakes and lizards are limited to certain parts of the world, such as remote islands, but it was crucial to their study.\n\n"We felt it was important to analyze genes from all the lizard groups, because almost every lizard family has been suggested as being the one most closely related to snakes," Hedges said. "If we had failed to include genes from even one of the lizard families, we could have missed getting the right answer."\n\nA possible theory to explain why snakes dropped their legs on land is that limbs are not conducive to their burrowing habits, Vidal said.\n\n"The idea is that if you have limbs sticking out, it's difficult to get into small openings," Hedges said. "It's more advantageous, because it enables snakes to get more food and offers safety from predators."\n\nHedges and Vidal did not find the closest lizard relative to snakes, but they did succeed in eliminating the monitor and marine lizards as possibilities.\n\n"This study doesn't answer all the questions," Hedges said. "In most fields, questions aren't answered all at once. They're answered in increments, and in this study, we've ruled out the marine theory, but that still leaves a lot of possibilities."\n\nHedges and Vidal said they hope to find the closest relative to snakes in the next year.\n\n"The work by Dr. Hedges and Dr. Vidal is a tremendous contribution to the body of knowledge," said Bryan Fry, deputy director of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "Their data provides strong evidence for the terrestrial loss of limbs."
319511
Dragons Naturally Speaking
622375
'Survival of the fittest' works to a lesser degree in the opposite direction too; just as animals with features that allow them to adapt better to their environment are more likely to successfully reproduce, animals with features that are not necessary might find them impeded by them and, thus, might find themselves less able to survive long enough to reproduce.\n\nIf you will, imagine a village of our distant ancestors. As we're not hanging from trees anymore (if we ever did), our tail has no practical purpose, but it's still hanging around (pun partly intended). Now, through random mutation protohuman A's tail turns out to be a little shorter than protohuman B's tail. So when a big predator comes chasing after them, A has an advantage because 1) the tail is not getting in the way of his running as much and 2) the predator has more difficulty seizing on to protohuman A. So protohuman B becomes a predator's lunch and protohuman A gets to pass his short-tailed genes onto his children.\n\nNow, you might say 'well, how can that possibly be enough? A 1- or 2mm difference from one generation to the next?' but there also is a concept of a 'feedback loop', which is quite logical to perceive. It's that, frankly, tails ain't sexy.\n\nAll of the predators munching on long-tailed protohumans might have developed a sense among the protowomenfolk that a long tail does not a good father make (you know, motion of the ocean etc.) So then, through the development of this biological preference (call it 'taste' or 'fashion'), the longtailed boys become the wallflowers - always the bridesmaid, never the mixed metaphor.\n\nIn short, every generation, the shorttails are more popular and have more children, and for all I know strut in a manly way around the longtails. This seriously alters the 'genetic lottery' of DNA, with the result that, over countless generations, we're down to the tiny stub that we have today (excepting the unfortunate).
326565
Just to note:  The lizard native to North America commonly called a "chameleon" is, in fact, nothing of the sort.  It is an anole.  Chameleons are native to the old world.  Compare the pictures below.\n\nAnoles look like "standard" lizards, long, narrow bodies approaching cylindrical (at least compared to chameleons), with small feet and a tail that more or less just drags behind them.  Male anoles have a skin flap (dewlap) under their chin that they expand to attract mates\n\nChameleons have taller bodies, flattened from side to side, wide, grasping feet, and tails they can consciously control.  Chameleons do not have a dewlap.
845358
What a cool project!  So to answer one of your questions, the crucial distinction among your phyla will be whether or not they're chordates -- which of course includes the vertebrates (but also some invertebrates such as sea squirts and certain worms).  \n\nSo your bipedal wolf (I'm assuming the missing d was a typo, but if "bipeal" is a word from your universe, please let me know) would be phylum chordata, class vertebrata, order mammalia, family canidae, genus canus, species lupus bipedalis (and I'm envisioning something like a cross between Lawrence Talbot and Speaker-to-Animals, without retractible claws).  But that's just off the top of my head.\n\nOne thing I've discussed with my ten-year-old son is the absence of hexapod vertebrates -- e.g. flying horses, winged dragons, etc.  If you were closer, I'd invite you over for coffee and an all-day discussion of where to classify them, and how they evolved.  Since all terrestrial vertebrates have essentially the same structure, it's clear they all shared a common ancestor which makes hexapodal vertebrates, sadly, impossible in our known universe -- so was there a hexapodal (imaginary) marine vertebrate who also scuttled across the floors of silent seas before crawling out of the surf and saying "Hey, the carcharodons can't get me here!  Kewl!"?  ...Which of course suggests all sorts of hexapodal marine vertebrates that shared the same skeletal architecture.  Ooooh, fun.\n\nAnd the final question... so zoology is the study of animals.  There's also cryptozoology, which I've described flippantly as "the study of imaginary animals."  But of course, it's more technically the study of animals that may or may not exist.  So what would we call your zoology, which is the study of animals you've intentionally invented?  Oh, of course, poeiazoology (-poeia, meaing to construct -- as in mythopoeia, the term Tolkien invented to describe the invention of mythologies.)\n\nAnd on that note, elen sila lumen omentielvo!
559225
Much of the support for the idea that snakes evolved at sea is their close phylogenetic relationship with the extinct group of marine reptiles, the mosasaurs.\n\nBoth snakes and mosasaurs share a number of unique characters, such as a hinge in the middle of the lower jaw, loss of the symphysis joining the two halves of the lower jaw, and the stabilization of the spinal column (the zygosphene-zygantra articulation).  These adaptations seem to have been a major evolutionary success, and led to adaptive radiations of the mosasaurs, snakes and the aigialosaurs (another extinct related group).\n\nIf the group (often called the Pythonomorpha) evolved at sea, it would explain a lot of the other adaptations (such as reduced or modified limbs) that these groups show.  However, more and more the fossil evidence seems to indicate that the Pythonomorpha probably evolved on land, and then each group developed adaptations ideal for marine environments totally separately.\n\nThis solution is not as elegant as it would be if all of the adaptations in the Pythonomorpha occurred at the same time, but it appears that sometimes evolution does not occur as elegantly as we might like.\n\nA terrestrial origin for snakes does explain some of the other unusual features of snakes, such as their eyes which show signs of having been reduced or completely lost at one point, and then an entirely new visual anatomy developed as they re-emerged from a subterrainean existence.
1168293
It depends entirley on hair colour, most adapt so that they blend in, but you can see them moving if there are lots, mostly they cling on to the hair as they find it very difficult to move out of hair. I have provided some links to close up pics of the beasties!
952619
The tails of fish and whales are different because they are the result of different evolutionary pathways, not because of direct functional factors. It is in fact an example of what happens when organisms with different structures, abilities and constraints are faced with the same functional requirement. \n\nFish have relatively simple vertebrae; in most cases, the vertebral centers look like biconcave cylinders that contact each other. This type of vertebrae allow the vertebral column to undulate laterally, and the tailfins of fish have evolved in a vertical arrangement, so that the lateral axial movement of the body moves the tail to provide thrust.\n\nIn contrast, the vertebrates that evolved adaptations for life on land, the tetrapods, don't have this type of vertebra any more. Our vertebral bodies are locked together by means of special apophyses (outgrowths). And although lizards and snakes undulate laterally, we mammals have lost that flexibility (as part of a different body structure that allows a different arrangement of lungs for respiration, etc). However, we can flex the spine up and down (or forward and backward, in humans) and many mammals that are fast runners use dorsoventral flexion/extension as part of their locomotion (if you've seen a film of a running cheetah, you know what I mean).\n\nNow, aquatic mammals use their limbs (more or less transformed into flippers) and tail to move in the water. They use the same powerful up-and-down body undulation as their ancestors used on land; in fact, this undulatory locomotion has been documented for a fossil ancestral whale,  Ambulocetus (see link).\n\nSo in this case, as in many others, we see more than one solution, and all are "optimal" (both are hydrodynamically efficient), but different because their evolutionary paths were just different, not better or worse.
25529
I believe so. I think they have just evolved into smaller things like iguanas, gheckos, lizards....etc.
399423
Snakes, lizards and amphisbaena (which most of you won't have heard of, but they're neat!) have "hemipenes", basically dual penises.  It has no real advantage, it's just how they evolved.  They only use one at a time.  It's just a different way to evolve a penis structure on a bilaterally symmetrical animal.
797930
Just that I am terrified  of them ,and it is a cold blooded reptile. Most change colors of the surface they are on. Good things about them are..they help control a lot of the insects that are harmful to man such as misquitoes, flys ect. there is only one known poisiones in the U.S. that is the Gilla Monster found in the deserts of the southwest USA. The rest you can play with and maybe get a painful bite.