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Here's Mom Jenny S.

I love Who's Smarted because it makes learning fun for my kids.

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Who's Smarted is the podcast my kids

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I'm Jane Lindholm.

Today we have a bonus episode for you,

all about some very special lizards. We're picking up right where we left off last week,

down in the basement of the San Diego Natural History Museum. I went there to talk with Adam Claus,

who manages the herpetology collection at the museum. Herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians,

which is actually kind of an odd pairing, as it turns out,

because reptiles and amphibians aren't actually all that closely related.

It's really just a historical thing that has been carried through to the present day. So it dates back to the founder of taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus. I don't know if anybody's heard of him, but he's the one who sort of created the system of scientific names for animals, which can always consist of two parts, right? And so he considered anything that didn't have sort of blood that sort of control its own

temperature.

So the way we control our own blood temperature, reptiles and amphibians do not.

And so he considered anything that sort of didn't have these characteristics as very primitive,

sort of creepy, kind of disgusting organisms.

And so just by virtue of that very arbitrary classification,

reptiles and amphibians were lumped together,

even though they're not necessarily each other's closest relatives.

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