Hi from Germany

[Kerry1968]

I ended up looking them all up to find out what they were! But I was good and didn't change my answers!

The last one I thought was a dart frog from the dendro part of the name. I guess it must mean poison or dangerous (something like that) in Latin.

I'm going to try to look out for the scientific names more and see what I can pick up.
Over on Caudata.org I'm getting to know some of the newt and salamander names, not completely, but can recognise the names when I see them!

I actually took latin as a subject at school, but that was FAR too long ago to remember any of it! I don't think it would have any bearing on species names anyway!

[John]

Dendro means tree. I am not sure what genius decided the genus Dendrobates were treefrogs (they are not).

I think and speak in scientific names unless I don't know it - in that case I use the common name. I only do this because there's no confusion - the scientific name is universal, even across languages. Of course, if the person doesn't know the scientific name I can always try the common name if I know it. I honestly don't know many of the common names. The scientific name business isn't hard - once you do it for a while you find you can learn others more readily.

[Kurt]

And if you do it long enough, you begin to see patterns and begin to understand what the names mean.