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A female in a species of legless legless
Adjective

1. without legs

2. Slang very drunk

Adj. 1. legless - not having legs; "a legless man in a wheelchair"
 amphibians amphibians

members of the animal class Amphibia. Includes frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and cecilians all capable of living on land or in water.
 called caecilians nourishes her youngsters by letting them eat the skin off her back, says an international research team.

Caecilians, which look like worms or snakes, burrow through the soil in the tropics tropics, also called tropical zone or torrid zone, all the land and water of the earth situated between the Tropic of Cancer at lat. 23 1-2°N and the Tropic of Capricorn at lat. 23 1-2°S. . Some species lay eggs, and quirks of several of these species got Mark Wilkinson Mark Wilkinson (born in Windsor, England on October 31952) is best known for his detailed surrealistic cover art that he created for a number of British bands, most prominently the Progressive Rock band, Marillion.  of the Natural History Museum in London and other researchers wondering whether these morns fed their young. The hatchlings had scraperlike teeth, for example, and they hung around their mother for their first weeks of life.

Now studying the egg-laying African species Boulengerula taitanus, Wilkinson and his colleagues have found the missing baby food. They dug up and observed 21 nesting females and their broods.

The researchers saw skinny, pink youngsters poke their lower jaws against their mother's' backs and peel off the dark outer layer of her skin, leaving her bluish blu·ish also blue·ish  
adj.
Somewhat blue.



bluish·ness n.
 white. Also, females with young develop an especially thick outer layer of skin with morsels of fat in it, the researchers report in the April 13 Nature.

The scraper See scraping.  teeth in these young resemble teeth of fetal caecilians in live-birth species. Scientists speculate that those youngsters use them to graze on the linings of their mothers' oviducts as they slide by. Since the skin feeders have the same kind of scraper teeth, researchers speculate they come from a lineage intermediate between ancient, egg-laying lineages of caecilians and more-recent lineages bearing live young.--S. M.
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Title Annotation:ZOOLOGY
Publication:Science News
Article Type:Brief article
Date:May 6, 2006
Words:241
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Still me, with kinks.

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