Introduction to Animal Diversity

Recall cards introducing the animal kingdom: the shared features of animals (heterotrophy, tissues, no cell walls, the diplontic life cycle, and the five clades from Parazoa to Bilateria); sexual, asexual, and parthenogenetic reproduction; embryonic development from cleavage through gastrulation, the germ layers, metamorphosis, and the Hox genes that pattern the body plan; the features used to classify animals (symmetry, germ layers, the coelom, and protostome versus deuterostome development); animal phylogeny (Eumetazoa, Radiata and Bilateria, Ecdysozoa and Lophotrochozoa, and choanoflagellate ancestry); and the evolutionary history of animals across the Ediacaran, the Cambrian explosion, and the later mass extinctions.