Talk:Desert grassland whiptail lizard

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Animals?[edit]

I thought one of the qualifications for being an animal was the ability to reproduce sexually? 75.118.170.35 (talk) 17:32, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- Then sponges would not be animals. The distinguishing characteristics are them being eurkaryotic (meaning cells have nucleus, organelles enclosed in membrane), multicellular, can't make their own food from non-organic sources and instead need to eat and usually digest their food in some kind of internal organ. They also have no cell walls, and are able to actively move for at least part of their lives (barnacles, sponges and corals being examples of that). Also, apparently the one, definite characteristic of exclusive to animals is having their emryonal cells at one point basically forming a hollow sphere. This is only found in animals, though it does not occur in all animals. Yes, I paraphrased this from Wikipedia. This might be part of my field of study, but I had to look up the exact things anyway, and translate them to boot. Sexual reproduction simply becomes more likely and asexual reproduction less likely, the more complex an animal becomes.

Lots of smaller creatures like Daphnia magna (which is one of the species making up what we call zooplancton) has both asexual and sexual reproduction cycles. You find this a lot with water animals, though usually the asexually produces offspring are basically clones of the mother. And with sponges you have three different forms of asexual reproduction, and one sexual. If you keep in mind that one of those asexual reproduction forms is basically breaking off a piece and placing it somewhere else, and it will grow on, one might think a sponge is a plant. But it has digestive cavities and can't produce its own food, among other things.

Oh, and it would be a pretty useless qualification, since plants and fungi too have sexual reproduction (being just the combination of material of two different reproduductive cells from two individuals - that can also be pollen or spores being brought to the fitting receptor), and even some processes of Bacteria can be compared to sexual reproduction, though that might be stretching it for this example.

Hope that helped. Jazhara7 (talk) 15:19, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Source for genus reassignment?[edit]

All the sources listed in the article still call it Cnemidophorus. Where is the source for the new genus? Hieronymus Illinensis (talk) 20:17, 9 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

here: https://bioone.org/journals/American-Museum-Novitates/volume-78/issue-3365/0003-0082(2002)365%3C0001:PROWLO%3E2.0.CO;2/Phylogenetic-Relationships-of-Whiptail-Lizards-of-the-Genus-span-classgenus/10.1206/0003-0082(2002)365%3C0001:PROWLO%3E2.0.CO;2.full Unfortunately I don't have time to add that as a proper source at the moment. Iamnotabunny (talk) 00:07, 25 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]