Why do animals like lizards need tails if their center of gravity is so close to the ground? Is it purely for mobility at that point? I don’t fully understand it
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Lizards don’t need tails.
Evolution doesn’t care if you need something or not, though, so unless a random mutation that gets rid of the tail not only provides an advantage to tailless individuals but *something* also happens to wipe out tailed individuals (for example being out-competed by their tailless cousins or climate change causing a period of extreme resource scarcity) your tail won’t just fall off just because you don’t need it.
Well, unless you’re a species of lizard that does have its tail fall off because you don’t need it. Then I guess it will, but that’s again just a random mutation which might be beneficial to the individuals that have it but won’t necessarily harm the ones that don’t.
Oh and to be clear, some lizards *do* need tails. They use them to help climb trees or whip at predators such as cats.
We suspect many animals use them for balance, and even have REALLY good evidence of it in many species like cats. The truth is that it’s just never been much of an evolutionary disadvantage for many animals that have them. Also, other animals use their tails completely differently than others and the tail provided an evolutionary advantage, thing of monkeys with prehensile tails used for climbing. Many lizards can drop their tails which gives them a chance to get away while the predator is eating the tail, also providing an evolutionary advantage.
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