Zoology (crash course)
There are 17 pages of notes for zoology. They are organized for anyone studying zoology anywhere, not just at a particular university. All the basic concepts are covered in this
Zoology is the study of wild animals in their natural habitats. Dr.
Rae Wynn-Grant has been studying wild animals for more than 15
years. Her work focuses on the way animal behavior can change in
environments where humans are present. The next 14 episodes will
give you a taste of the incredible diversity in the animal kingdom.
Crash Course Zoology is a look at animals that sense electricity and
magnetic fields. Zoology can give us the tools to make sense of it
all. Just wait until you hear how many beetles there are, or how sea
apples evolved and then evolved their current body shape and
lifestyle again
*What is an animal?
Zoology is the scientific field dedicated to asking and answering
questions about animals. Today, zoologists are many different
things -- scientists, veterinarians, biomedical engineers,
conservationists, and so much more. The question isn’t who is a
zoologist but what is an animal. We'll trace the evolution of the over
1. 5 million different creatures we know about. Carl Linnaeus
developed binomial nomenclature, a system of giving all animals a
two-part Latin name. The system is how we identify animals with a
similar hierarchy. Some of his other work is considered scientific
racism, a debunked pseudoscience that categorizes humans into “
,varieties '' based on their skin color. Many animals have similar
traits because they're related, called homologous traits. But they
can also have traits that evolved completely independently, called
analogous traits. Figuring out if a trait is homologized or analogous
can be really hard. Zoologists estimate the tarantula-turtle C.
elegans sandwich has 600 to 800 million years of filling. The
turtle-fish sandwich has “only ” 443 million years. That’s when these
animals last shared a common ancestor.
Zoologists study animal relationships using a phylogeny diagram or
a phylogenetic tree. The branches represent all the different
lineages that diverged from common ancestors. Branch lengths
also show how related species are. The longer the branch, the more
distantly-related two groups are. Zoologists use terms like
early-diverging clades to describe splits that happened long ago.
There's no best way to make a phylogeny, and one phylogeny is
really just a hypothesis for all the evolutionary relationships
between species or clades based on specific traits or groups of
traits. Zoologists will often make several phylogenies using
different approaches. If we keep getting the same answer, we know
our phylogeny can help answer our big question: what is an animal?
Crash Course Zoology is produced by Complexly in partnership with
PBS and NATURE. It is shot on the Team Sandoval Pierce stage at
, Porchlight Studios in Santa Barbara. If you’d like to help keep Crash
Course free for everyone, you can join our community on Patreon.
*What’s the Most “Animal” Animal?
Zoologists want to know what is an average animal and what is a
rare animal. IN 2021 we know of about 1. 5 million different animals
out there... Zoologists try to find the median animal by ordering
them from the first to diverge from other animals to the latest.
There are 30 million species of insects, crustaceans, and arachnids.
But mostly beetles. Terry Erwin from the Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History used the diversity ratio technique to
estimate that there were 30 million arthropods in the tropics alone.
Since. In the 1980s, Erwin &s estimate has been recalculated to
make various improvements. IN 2021., zoologists estimate that the
global species richness is 8 to 10 million. Phylum Arthropoda
includes over 1. 1 million different species... Phyla is like a genre of
animals--. They share some key characteristics, but each lineage
within a phylum is a little. a little bit different. Our model animal
probably belongs to the most successful phylum--the phylum that
has lots of different species with a wide variety of traits...
Arthropods have a segmented body covered in a hard exoskeleton
and include insects, along with crustaceans, milli-and centi-pedes,
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