Lizard
Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians or "worm lizards"), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Living lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon.
Most lizards are quadrupedal, running with a strong side-to-side motion. Some lineages (known as "legless lizards") have secondarily lost their legs, and have long snake-like bodies. Some lizards, such as the forest-dwelling Draco, are able to glide. They are often territorial, the males fighting off other males and signalling, often with bright colours, to attract mates and to intimidate rivals. Lizards are mainly carnivorous, often being sit-and-wait predators; many smaller species eat insects, while the Komodo eats mammals as big as water buffalo.
Lizards make use of a variety of antipredator adaptations, including venom, camouflage, reflex bleeding, and the ability to sacrifice and regrow their tails.
Snakes are descended from lizards, so cladistic classification systems often regard "lizard" as a paraphyletic group (a group with a shared evolutionary origin, but excluding some descendant groups, in this case snakes). In order to regard lizards as a monophyletic clade (a group with a single origin and no descendants excluded), one would have to classify snakes as a type of lizard. This would also make lizards and squamates equivalent terms.
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