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1. By DC Blackburn & DB Wake (for full contact details, see the list after References). The title of this contribution should be cited as “Class Amphibia Gray, 182. In: Zhang, Z.-Q.(Ed.) Animal biodiversity: An outline of higher-level classification and survey of taxonomic richness”. 2. The Amphibian Species of the World website (Frost, 2011), a continuation of Frost (1985), has guided our work; this site provides detailed information on the taxonomic history of the names we discuss here. Our decisions on which taxa to recognize and at what level are based on current literature and our assessment of current usage. Numbers of species used in our classification are based on the AmphibiaWeb website (www. amphibiaweb. org; Accessed 13 October 2011).

3. Linnaeus (1758) used Amphibia for a different assemblage of taxa than currently recognized, and authorship for the currently understood taxon is either de Blainville, 1816 (Dubois, 2004) or Gray, 1825. Frost et al.(2006) detail reasons for rejecting de Blainville as the authority. Phylogenetic analyses based on molecular data for extant taxa support the monophyly of a clade containing Anura, Caudata, and Gymnophiona (eg, Zardoya & Meyer, 2001; San Mauro et al., 2005). Phylogenetic analyses of morphological characters, including from a wide-range of extinct taxa, support this clade, with the extinct family Albanerpetontidae included in the crown group (eg, Sigurdsen & Green, 2011; Ruta et al., 2003; Laurin & Reisz, 1997; Trueb & Cloutier, 1991b). However, some morphology-based analyses support non-monophyly of extant amphibians by placing the Gymnophiona more closely to extant amniotes …