I was going to post a little blurb about how one result of the fact that reptiles and amphibians have been around much longer than mammals on planet Earth is how advanced many of their adaptations are. While armadillos have armor, no mammal has anything to compare to the turtle shell, a home the animal carries on its back. No mammal has poisons as strong as those of poison frogs.

Spitting Cobra VS Mongoose

This logic, that the life form that has been around longer has the more extreme adaptations, holds true for ocean life, where the fastest, largest, most poisonous, etc species on Earth all live; however, my personal hypothesis about reptiles having more extreme examples of adaptations than mammals got blown apart with one critter: the porcupine.

Yes, there are horned lizards, but nothing in the reptile world compares to the bristling spines of porcupines and hedgehogs, which are hairs that have adapted to this purpose. Reptiles have had longer to evolve such a trait, but perhaps they didn’t evolve such extreme examples because they lacked the basic material, body hair?

You can check out the complete flickr set here.