Reptiles & Amphibians

Support for the Nature Museum is provided by Rose Pest Solutions, protecting homes, businesses, health, and the environment since 1860. Hi everyone, and welcome back to Curious by Nature. My name is Erin, and this week is Reptile Awareness Week. So we're going to learn a little bit more about reptiles and amphibians with our living collections. Let's get started. So I'm joined by Biggie the corn snake. And Biggie is a reptile. A reptile is a group of animals. They are going to be cold-blooded animals, and they're going to have drier skin than other cold-blooded animals. This is important. They're going to have bones. So Biggie has lots and lots of bones within his very long body. He's got a very long spine and rib bones all the way from the top of his head to the tip of his tail. And Biggie is covered in scales. And scales are made out of the same things that your fingernails are made out of. It's a building block of scales. So if you take a peek at your own fingernails, you will see they almost look like snake scales. The reason reptiles are covered in kind of a drier, scalier skin than other cold-blooded animals is that that allows them to live almost anywhere. So you could find a reptile in lots of different habitats. You could find them in marshes, mountains, prairies, forests. With a dry, scaly, protective skin, they don't have to worry about much. They're completely protected all over their body. So let's take a deeper look at Biggie's scales. As we take a peek at them, you'll notice that there are different shapes happening across his body. So the scales on the very top of his body, they're going to be kind of shaped like almonds. So they're very round, while the scales on his belly are very long and very flat. So having very long and wider scales on his belly allows Biggie, if he were in the wild, to have some tread on his belly. He would slither around on lots of different habitats. So there might be pine needles, leaves, sand, gravel. And having almost like tread, like the bottom of your boots in the snow, means he's not going to slip or slide over anything while he might be pursuing prey or finding a safe space to go. Their eggs are going to be something that give them away as a reptile. So reptile eggs are going to have a leathery case to them and have everything that that young needs to survive inside. And when a young snake hatches out of an egg, it's going to look almost exactly like its parents. It's going to be just a smaller version of that animal. And while I mentioned that Biggie is a cold-blooded animal, he's an ectotherm, that means that he gets his energy by the temperature around him. So in his enclosure at the Nature Museum, he has a heat lamp because a warm spot for a snake is going to give them energy. So once again, the features of a reptile are going to be dry scaly skin that allows them to live just about anywhere. They're going to have eggs that have a leathery case to them and they're ectotherms. They are cold-blooded animals. So I'm going to put Biggie back in the lab, but we're going to be joined by another living collections friend that will tell us a little bit more about what amphibians are and maybe some differences between amphibians and reptiles and how those differences might just be skin deep. Now we're joined here by Dart, the tiger salamander, and he is an amphibian. And with Dart, we're going to take a peek at him. His skin is very, very different from Biggie's skin. When we look at him, I always take out some RO water from the look-in lab at the Nature Museum. That stands for reverse osmosis water. It's a process in which all the impurities of tap water are taken out. So when we handle Dart, we handle him with just the cleanest water because his skin is so, so porous. That means it can soak up a lot of different things. So when we're looking at Dart and exploring his skin, I wanted us to look at his entire body because a lot of people, when they see a tiger salamander, they're out and about in Illinois. They are actually the state amphibian. They look a lot like a lizard does. They have a head, four arms, one really long tail. And with those features, people tend to think reptile and lizard. But with the salamander, what's going to give them away right away is their skin will not be scaly like Biggie's skin. And when you look at those four limbs at the very ends of each of his fingers, there's not going to be any claws. A lot of lizards are going to have keratin at the very end of their fingertips. But the salamander, without any scales, without any keratin, there aren't going to be any claws. Instead, you're just going to see very stubby, tinier fingers that are really good for sticking onto things. So reptile eggs have that leathery case again. So salamander eggs are going to be more like jelly, and they're laid in the water. They need to have a source of moisture always. And then when salamander eggs hatch, instead of looking like just smaller versions of salamanders, they're going to look a lot more like tadpoles. And the one thing that is similar when it comes to reptiles and amphibians is that they're both cold-blooded. So Dart here is an ectotherm, he is a cold-blooded animal. So let's think about what we saw. We saw Biggie the corn snake with scales, with dry skin. And we saw Dart the tiger salamander with moisture skin. So when it comes to making differences between reptiles and amphibians, it's really just skin deep. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed meeting Biggie and Dart. And be sure to leave any questions on reptiles or amphibians in the comments below. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. We'll see you here next time on Curious by Nature.