The amphibians Include frogs, toads, and salamanders. The reptiles include lizards, snakes, crocodiles, and turtles. There are astonishing facts about these creatures which clearly prove they could not have been formed by evolutionary processes.

FRESH FROZEN -Some creatures survive the winter by hibernating. Others burrow deep into the ground to avoid freezing temperatures. But there are others which actually do freeze! The painted turtle of the northern U.S., can freeze in the win­ter and still survive. It can be in water which freezes solid, and as long as less than 54 per­cent of the water in its body freezes, it will later thaw out and do just fine. As freezing nears, the blood sugar levels in this turtle triples, and cer­tain amino acids, which act as antifreeze prepa­rations, greatly increase in its body. In addition glycerol, another antifreeze substance, triples.

MIDWIFE FROG -Unlike most frogs, the female midwife frog lays her eggs on land close to water. The male midwife frog takes the eggs as they are being laid by the female- and twines the strings of eggs about its hind legs.

He then digs a hole in moist sand or soil, which he does very rapidly. There he sits with the egg string, waiting patiently while the eggs incubate.

Then, at a certain time, he knows to suddenly climb out of the hole and jump into the water and begins swimming energetically. This breaks the egg membranes, and tiny tadpoles scatter in all directions.

GECKO LIZARD- This tiny lizard can walk across your smooth ceiling upside‑down without falling off. Scientists could not figure out how the little fellow accomplished the task. Using optical microscopes up to 2,000 diameters magnification, they found thousands of transverse lines running across each of the four finger‑like toes on each foot. Well, that gave some information, but it did not solve the problem.

Then the powerful scanning microscope was in­vented, and it was turned on the foot of the gecko lizard. A series of photographs were taken, each 35,000 diameters or more in magnification. They discovered that each of the "fingerprint" ridges on its toe‑was filled with millions of short fibers or hairs; on the ends of each was a tiny suction cup!

This would provide immense sticking power­ too immense. The poor creature could put its foot down on a smooth surface‑and not be able to lift it back up! But the lizard's foot is designed so that the toe joints bend or curl up at the ends. In this way, the gecko lizard can bend up each toe, and unstick them gradually without having to do it all at once.

It was estimated that one gecko lizard has at least 500 million suction cups on his 16 toes How wondrously made are even the smallest of the an­imal life forms.

Evolution could not enable the gecko lizard to walk on ceilings. Remember that the next time you see a lizard walking on a wall.

SERPENT'S TONGUE -As its forked tongue flickers in and out, the serpent is picking up small particles from the air or ground and transferring them to Jacobson's organ. This is a special struc­ture shaped like a pair of pits in the roof of the mouth, with a sensory organ lining similar to that in a nose,‑but much more accurate.

PRODUCING FROGS -A frog lays its eggs, but no frog hatches from the eggs. Instead, a flsh, ­well, something like a fish—comes out of the egg. It has gills and is entirely aquatic. Remove it from the water where it is swimming and it will quickly die, for it cannot breathe air from the atmosphere.

Soon the tadpole begins to sprout legs. A fish growing legs! In a few days, it undergoes a ra­dical transformation. Its gills disappear, and lungs and other organs are formed. A little longer and the tadpole has become a hog! From then on, it can go on land or into water and is perfectly adapted to both.

Every spring the miracle occurs again. Frogs produce eggs, which become fish‑like creatures, which become frogs with lungs.

  CHUCKWALLA -The chuckwalla is a desert li­zard living in the Mojave Desert in the American southwest.

It is 16 inches [40.64 cm[ in length with a creased, wrinkled, baggy hide which looks as if it were several sizes too large. It also has an over­size stomach.

Why is it so wrinkled? At the approach of an enemy the lizard quickly crawls into a sack in the rock. Once inside, it grips the rock, sucks in air, and pumps up its body to as much as 300 per­cent of normal size. This jams it into the crack so tightly that enemies cannot get it out.

There might not be any rain for a full year, so the chuckwalla is only active in late spring and early summer. The rest of the time it is hibernat­ing. Emerging about March 20, it eats every plant it can find. Beneath all the Baggy, baggy skin along its sides are lymph spaces which it fills with water whenever it can find any. By August its stored water is nearly gone, and it goes into hibernation till the following spring, while living on its food reserves.

The plants it eats all grow on alkali soil, so they are full of sodium and potassium salts. Each summer the chuckwalla eats enough salt to kill it. In its nasal passages there are two bean‑shaped glands connected to ducts which run forward to a pool inside the nostril. The glands are a chem­istry department which extracts the salts. They flow to the pool, where they are expelled by sneezing.

Because the morning is colder than the evening, this little lizard is a late riser. In the morning it changes to a dark color so it will be able to absorb more sunshine faster. Later in the day, it changes to a light color to help it better reflect the sun's rays.

When the afternoon temperature climbs to 102°F [38.8°C], as it very often does, the lizard craws under a shady rock and pants to cool itself off.

All that required a lot of careful designing by a highly intelligent Creator. And all the design sys­tems were then carefully incorporated into the chuckwalla's DNA coding.

  EATING WITH THEIR EYES -Toads and frogs use their eyes to eat with. In swallowing, they close their eyelids, press down with their ex­tremely tough eyeballs, and lower the roof of their mouth against their tongue, forcing the food down and into their stomachs.

  HEAT SENSORS -The pitted vipers include, in the U.S., the rattlesnakes and copperheads. These snakes have two small pits or depressions on their heads beneath their eyes. With these pits, the snakes can "see" in the dark, for they sense changes in infra‑red radiation aril thus detect very slight differences in temperature.

The crotalid snake has a sense organ on its head which can detect temperature changes as small as 1 /100th of a degree. But consider the rat­tlesnake: That creature, with its pits, is able to sense a change of 1/600th degree F.

A boa constrictor responds in 35 milliseconds to a heat change of a fraction of a degree.

  ALLIGATOR -The alligator pushes together a mound of dirt and lays eggs in it. These eggs have moderately hard shells. Inside each one is a baby alligator which will grow to a length of about 8 inches [20.32 cm]. Then it is time to come out.

But how can it do that? The egg case is too hard to break. So, like many baby birds, the alligator has a special "tooth" on the tip of its nose. Striking it against the egg case causes it to split open and out the baby alligator emerges. Shortly afterward, the tooth drops off.

Where did that tooth come from? To put it there would require thousands of DNA changes. But by the time random evolution accomplished them all, all the alligators in the works would be dead, having not been able to get out of their egg cases.

It is of interest that, although an alligator can close its jaws with a force sufficient to break a person's arm, the muscles that open its jaws are so weak that it is possible for a man to hold the mouth of a full-grown alligator shut with only one hand. (But watch out for that tail!)

  REGENERATING PARTS -HOW Can a salamander re-grow an amputated limb? Why is a lizard able to develop a new tail that has been bitten off? Yet many of these reptiles can do this.

Other creatures can do it also. Crabs can re­generate a claw that has been snapped off. If a lobster loses an eye, it will grow a new one.

By the way, if your liver was in good health and part of it was cut out, it would re-grow the lost portion within a few months.

  GREEN SEA TURTLE -The glean sea turtle has excellent physiological thermo-regulators. It is able to warm faster and cool slower than any other similar-sized reptile in the works. This trait is needed in the cold ocean waters in which it swims.

How can the turtle become warm so rapidly and cool so slowly? It has the largest difference in warming and cooling heart rate of any reptile. This means that, during the warming process, its heart beats much faster than it normally would. Its cool­ing heart rate is virtually independent of body temperature,-something that appears to be unique for any vertebrate.

  FROG EGGS- When a female frog lays her eggs, they are in a jelly mass which quickly ab­sorbs immense amounts of water. Rapidly, the jelly mass of eggs becomes far larger than the fe­male frog they came from!

  PRODUCING MORE REPTILES- Reptiles have a variety of ways of producing young. Skinks, lacertas, boas and vipers belong to groups that have both oviparous (lay eggs) and viviparous (bear young live from placentas) types of mem­bers. Still other reptiles, such as sea snakes and certain amphibians, are ovovlparous (have embryos, which develop in the mother but are in separate egg cases).

Some species, such as the adder and the com­mon lizard, lay eggs in warm parts of their hab­itat (oviparous), but in northern areas will bear their young live (viviparous).

Caecilians look like large earthworms but are amphibians. Some of them lay eggs (oviparous), while others are viviparous and produce milk in the uterus.

The black salamander is viviparous, and nourishes its young, as do sharks, on unfertilized eggs in the oviduct.

At least two kinds of lizards are parthenogenetic: the females bear young without having been fertilized.

Two lizards are hermaphroditic: two lizards fertilize each other, and then both bear young.

  AUSTRALIAN FROG- There is a small Australian frog which has a totally unique method of giving birth to its young. It does not have a placental womb as do mammals, or the marsupial outside pouch that many other creatures in Australia have. And it does not lay eggs in a nest on the ground. Instead it swallows them!

This little creature uses its stomach to hatch the eggs! It uses its stomach both to digest food and as a womb!

When this frog becomes pregnant, the stomach stops its digestion functions and ceases to excrete enzymes. Instead, it becomes an incubator, where dozens of baby frogs are hatched.

Soon mama frog has dozens of live baby frogs crawling around in her stomach! Seeing the hole at the top, they crawl up the esophagus into her mouth, and she spits them out. When the last one emerges, the "womb" again becomes a regularly functioning stomach!

  GOLDEN TOAD -The golden toad lives in the cloud forest high in the mountains of Costa Rica. Bright orange in cola, this little frog is easy to see when it comes out in the open. Yet, all year long, it is not seen. Then, after the first heavy rain of the spring, the males, which are even more brightly colored, gather in pools of water and sit quietly waiting. Then the females arrive. Thou­sands of golden toads will be together in a few locations. Within less than a week, mating will be past and they will disappear in the forest, where they will be hidden for the rest of the year. But for a brief time they were all together‑in such large numbers that there were too many for their predators to eliminate.

  CAMOUFUGE-The leopard hog lives in moist grass among the edge of ponds, and wears a green coat to blend with the grass, but it also has irregular blotches of brown on its back which are the color of the shadows among the green grasses.

Horned toads in the Southwest have a color so similar to that of the desert sand that the animal is not seen until it moves.

  SNAKE EYED Snakes in the viper family do not change focus by changing the shape of their lenses, as do other reptiles. Instead they shift the whole lens farther forward or farther back.

Examination of the retina discloses that these snakes have twice as many cones as we do! This means that they can see color far better than people can.

Snake eyes are different from the eyes of any other creature among the reptiles or vertebrates.

  Even evolutionists admit that the eye had to be newly invented for the snake; it did not get it from anything else.

Vertebrate eyes are like a simple camera, in which light enters the lens, which being actuated by several different methods, then directs it through transparent vitreous fluid to a focus on the retina, the light‑sensitive area which covers two‑thirds of the rear part of the eyeball.

But in the snake there is an outer "spectacle." Something like a contact lens over the eye, this is the transparent scale that covers each eye. Because the snake must crawl in the dust, and even go down holes in the dirt and between dirty leaves, and between dusty rocks, it needed eye protection. Without that clear, covering scale, the delicate cornea would be damaged and the snake would soon be blinded.

Gradually this outer scale becomes scratched, dimming the snake's vision. But it can sense odors with its tongue, and (in the case of the pit vipers) directional heat on its pits, so it can make it without clear eyesight. Several times a year the snake sheds its skin. At that time it gets a new spectacle, and can see well again for a time.

A snake with transparent scaled Yes, as we have just observed, there are two of them on every snake. Would anyone say it is by coincidence‑that they are right over its eyeballs! How could the randomness of "evolution" produce that?

  HUNGRY TOADS -if it has no food to eat, a toad can go for a full year without food. It spends most of this time resting to conserve heat and energy.

SALTY CREATURES -Sea turtles and sea iguanas (a mammoth lizard) both have the ability to remove salt from the water they drink. Special glands in their bodies routinely accomplish this task.

  DARWINS FROG -This Small frog does something so unusual that Darwin ought to be embarrassed that it is named after him, for it does not help the cause of evolution.

The male has vocal sacs which he uses to sing with, but they are structured in such a way that he can also use them to hold the eggs that the female lays! The eggs go into his mouth and from there do not go into his stomach, but into two channels on the floor of his mouth. These lead into a pouch under his neck which grows larger as the eggs hatch. When the baby frogs are born, they remain there till they pass through the larval stage.

  CROCODILE -The Nile River crocodile never bothers the plover, because that little bird walks over to it as it opens its huge mouth with 48 teeth -and cleans them! The bird will fly about its head to catch its attention. Seeing the little bird, it comes out on land, opens its mouth-and the bird walks right inside to give the teeth a good cleaning!

When the crocodile opens its mouth, no water goes down its throat because of a special flap at the back of its mouth. When it closes its mouth, the water continues to run into it because it has no lips and many cracks.

After 30 minutes underwater, all of its metabolism slows down, with the exception of its heart and brain. In this way it can remain underwater longer.

This large creature, which is 18 feet [30.5 dm] long and 1,800 pounds [816.5 kg], has a special transparent eyelid that covers the eyeball when it is submerged. The eyeball is designed with shiny skin behind the retina, in order to reflect light onto the retina. In this way it can see better in the darkness under the water than it otherwise could.

  HORNED DESERT VIPER -The Egyptian horned desert viper is 2 feet [61 cm] long and yellowish-brown. It lives in sand which frequently is 115°F [46°C]. Yet if the body temperature of this snake goes over 105°F [40.5°C], it will die. How then does it survive?

In the daytime, it crawls under the sand where it is cooler, remaining there till evening. It has spe­cial scales on its body which it opens up and, like little shovels, uses to scoop out sand. As it does this, it throws that sand on top of its body. This snake can do that operation in 2 seconds! Then it crawls under the sand and keeps cool and avoids desert hawks.

Once under, it leaves the last 2 inches [5.08 cm] of its tail above the sand. This tail wiggles every so often, and that intrigues the desert mouse, which the snake then catches.

There is a horn above each eye, which is some­thing like an awning to shade the eye from the sun. But when the snake throws sand up and over its back, the horns keep the sand from falling into its eyes‑not only when it is digging, but after­ward while it is hiding under the sand.

The sand is too slippery and hot for a snake to crawl through in the regular way. So, the Egyp­tian horned desert viper crawls sideways through the sand, just as does the sidewinder in the Amer­ican deserts. It humps its body up as it goes so that only parts touch the sand at any given time. This leaves "J" marks in the sand. the snake looks like it is going forward when it is really going sideways. Who taught these two snakes, so very distant from each other, to travel in the same way?

  TURTLES -Turtles have special water sacs at the rear of their bodies. When a turtle submerges, water is drawn into these sacs and then expelled again. Air in the water is absorbed by a special type of "underwater lung" arrangement. In this way, oxygen is supplied to the turtle's body while it is underwater. When the turtle comes to the sur­face again, it opens its mouth and breathes. That air is taken into its regular lungs to provide a more direct flow of oxygen to its body. So the turtle has two totally different types of lungs!

  STICK LIZARD -No, it is not a stick lizard, but it is a lizard with a stick. This is a small lizard in the Near East which likes to make sure a stick is always near for protection. No, it does not beat its enemies over the head with it! Instead, it goes about its business eating and resting in the sun. Then, when an enemy is about to leap upon it,­ the little lizard grabs that stick- and holds it side­ways in its mouth! Who wants to eat a stick; especially one that won't fit in its mouth?

The special enemy of this lizard is the snake, and it has to swallow its food whole. It cannot merely bite off a piece and swallow that, then bite off another piece. Because the serpent cannot swallow both the lizard and that sideways stick, it gives up and glides away.

  GREEN SEA TURTLES -The green sea turtle migrates from the coast of Brazil to tiny Ascen­sion Island, 1,400 miles [2,253 km] out in the Atlantic Ocean, and then back. No one has figured out how the green sea turtle knows where to go, or knowing, how it is able to find that tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic.

  SEYCHELLES FROG -This little land frog lives on the Seychelles Islands, off the coast of Kenya, Africa. It is 1 inch [2.54 cm] long and light brown with dark brown horizontal streaks.

The female lays eggs on the ground, and the male guards them. When predators come, he lures them away. These frogs and their eggs are never in the water. When the eggs hatch, the father exudes a liquid goo onto his back. Then he hops near and touches the tiny frogs. Immediately they swim up by means of that liquid onto his back. Once on, the father frog can hop around and his babies will not fall off!

They swim around through that liquid on his back for a month. All during that time, his back continues to exude more mucous. During that time, they feed on the yolk in the eggs. They must be in fluid during that time, since baby tadpoles have no lungs as adult frogs do. Instead, their long tails have blood vessels close to the skin­which absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide.

After a month, they jump off his back and hop away. The mucous on the father's back stops coming out and his back dries off.

  PIPE SNAKE -The pipe snake of Southeast Asia is somewhat blunt at both ends, hence the name. It is difficult to tell which is the front end.

When an enemy comes, the tail end flattens out, rises in the air -and looks like an angry cobra defending itself. Looking more closely at this "head," we find that it has black and white bars, just like those on the cobra, with a red tip at the end that looks like its mouth! There it is with its "head" raised, seemingly ready to strike, while its body is coiled-and underneath those coils is its real head protected. If the enemy leaves, as much of the time it will, then the pipe snake un­coils and quickly travels to a safer place.

This is not a trait which the pipe snake learned.

It lives in the same regions where the dreaded cobra lives, and it is born with this protective col­oration, flattening and other abilities. As soon as a pipe snake is born, it can imitate a cobra.

 GLIDING TREE FROG -The gliding tree frog never goes into water, but remains all its life in the trees and on the ground of the Borneo jun­gle. It has webbing between each toe which it can spread wide like a duck's foot. This helps it glide like a little parachute. With its sticky toes, it climbs to near the top of a tree 140 feet [426 dm] above the ground. Then it sucks in its neck and sto­mach so that both are concave‑curved inward­ and then it leaps out into the air!

Before jumping it selects a landing spot near the lower part of another tree. As it travels, it has a range finder in its eyes and brain that tell it that, based on the vertical distance to the ground and the horizontal distance between the trees, the di­agonal angle of this leap will be 230 feet [701 dm].

Downward it goes, twisting its feet slightly‑as a rudder‑to help it turn toward the left or right. At the last moment, it tips up so that it will land with its head up on the tree trunk. From there, it jumps a final 6 feet [18 dm] and lands perfectly on the ground.

Yet all this was done in the inky blackness of night inside a jungle, with the overhead foliage shutting out the starlight) The little frog does all that sighting, leaping, and landing in apparent darkness.

Before concluding, let us consider its nest: Baby frogs are tadpoles and must have liquid to swim around in, but this frog never enters the wa­ter. So it builds a nest in the trees out of foam! Both the male and female release albumen from their body onto the top of a large leaf, stir it up till it is foamy, then the female lay eggs in it. By the time the eggs hatch, the foam is more liquid, and the tadpoles swim around in it. Eventually they grow large enough‑although still tiny creatures‑that they jump out of the nest. When they do that, they plunge over a hundred feet to the ground below. Being so light‑weight, they land without injury and hop away.

 INCUBATING EGGS—Sea turtles and some birds lay their eggs in the warm sand. In this way they are kept warm until they hatch. Some allig­ators will gather together a mass of decaying veg­etable matter, and lay their eggs in it. As the vegetation continues to decay, the temperature will remain warm enough to nicely incubate the eggs.

 ALPINE SALAMANDER- Climbing up into the high grasslands on the slopes of the Alps, from 3,000 to 10,000 feet [914-3,048 m] altitude, you will find the Alpine Salamander.

When the female is ready to lay her eggs, she does not do so in the regular manner, for it is too cold outside. Instead, 50 eggs go from the ovaries into the oviducts; of these, two will be fertile. These will hatch and then remain in the female's body, living and growing as they feed on the other 48 eggs in there! How could only two-exactly two-be fertilized, and not the rest, since they were all expelled from the ovaries?

When they finally emerge, they are just like their parents but smaller.

 EGG-EATING SNAKE- There are certain snakes which primarily eat eggs. These snakes are about 2 feet tong, have a narrow head and slender body, no sharp teeth, and are not venomous.

These creatures can swallow eggs which are wider than their bodies) It would be equivalent to a human swallowing a basketball!

Locating an egg, the snake coils around it, and then opens its jaw several times to exercise it. Next it begins to swallow that egg! It unhinges its jaw, opens it amazingly wide, and starts taking in the egg. This is not easy to do, and the snake must push his head against it for about 20 min­utes in order to succeed. It is a close fit!

As the egg enters the throat, the egg begins to crack. This is because there are about 30 teeth in a row along the back of the throat which point downward. The first 17 are knife‑like and long; the next several are broad and flat; the final ones are more like stumps. When the egg reaches the back of the throat, the snake begins moving its head forward and backward over the egg, and this cau­ses a sawing action by the teeth on the eggshell.

When the egg breaks, the liquid flows down into the stomach, but in front of it is a valve which admits the liquid- but not the egg shells. The snake then carefully gathers the egg shells into a ball and spits them out.

This snake feeds only for about one or 2 months a year, during egg-laying season. The rest of time it rests or hibernates.

Imagine a creature with teeth in the back of its throat instead of in its mouth!

 SNAKE EARS-A special bone is attached to a serpent's jaw. As a result, the snake can hear best when its head is pressed dose to the ground. But when the head is lifted into the air, its hear­ing is much poorer.

FLYING SNAKE-There is a snake in South America, called the paradise snake, which flies from one tree to another. h is really more of a glide than anything else, for the snake has no wings. As it launches from a tree limb into space, the snake flattens its ribs tremendously and then glides to a landing place. Arriving at its destina­tion, it recoils its ribs in their regular rounded ar­rangement, and then it crawls away.

 FALSE-EYED FROG- The South American false-eyed frog is an interesting creature. Gen­erally about 3 inches [7.62 cm] long, it is brown, black, blue, gray, and white! Drops of each color are on its skin, and it can suddenly change from one of these colors to the others, simply by mask­ing out certain color spots.

The change-color effect that this frog regular produces is totally amazing, and completely un­explainable by any kind of evolutionary theory.