Anyone who has learned to identify animals for themselves, instead of posting a photo online with the caption "What's this?", knows how much the location matters. The first reason is simple math. There are more than 12,000 kinds of reptiles and 9,000 kinds of amphibians in the world, but maybe a few dozen live where you do. Picking one animal out of a hundred is a lot easier than picking one out of 21,000. The second reason is that many herps look almost exactly alike. Telling two species apart can come down to counting tiny scales. And animals of the same species can look wildly different from each other.
This lesson is part of Certified Junior Herpetologist. Enrollment is self-paced, with no deadline to finish (about 30 hours).
