the.com/reptile
a sun-powered survivor that outlived the dinosaurs by simply refusing to die out.
means A cold-blooded, scaly vertebrate — like a snake, lizard, turtle, or crocodile — that regulates its body heat from the outside world rather than burning its own fuel.
from From Latin 'reptilis,' meaning 'creeping,' from the verb 'repere,' 'to crawl.' The word slithered into English through Old French in the medieval period, carrying its literal sense: a thing that moves low to the ground, belly to the earth. That crawling image stuck so hard that 'reptile' became an insult long before it was a tidy biological class — to call someone a reptile was to call them a groveling, low creature. The scientific pigeonholing came later.
- cold-blooded
- runs on borrowed heat, not its own furnace
- ancient lineage
- older than mammals by tens of millions of years
- third eye
- some lizards sense light through their skull
- slow burn
- a snake can digest for weeks on one meal
- scaly armor
- keratin shields, same protein as your fingernails
komodo dragon — world's largest living lizard, found only in indonesia, weighs up to 366 pounds
saltwater crocodile — largest living reptile, found in australia and southeast asia, can exceed 20 feet
green anaconda — heaviest snake species, native to south america, weighs up to 550 pounds
leatherback sea turtle — largest turtle species, migrates 12,000 miles annually across pacific ocean