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Relationships Among Animals

This activity can be found in your digital course.

What body aspects and genes do animals share that help us understand their evolution?

Record Data and Observations

Part 1

1. Complete the chart to organize the information about the lungfish and coelacanth.

Lungfish Coelacanth
Location
Africa, Australia, South America Indonesia, South Africa

Environment
Freshwater, during dry season they Deep Marine Habitat
can burrow into mud

Reproduction
Build underwater nests and lay Eggs are fertilized internally
small eggs which hatch in 8 days

Fins
They have paired appendages with The coelacanth is a lobe-finned
a single support bone fish. Its aired fins are muscular
and contain a central bone for
support
Other
Important Lungfish gills are reduced, and Second, it has an organ on its
they can obtain oxygen from air head called the "rostral organ"
structures through primitive lungs. The heart, which can detect electric fields
though Still fish-like, has a and may be used in monitoring
partial division in the atrium, and its surroundings.
functions similarly to
amphibians' three chambered heart.
Oxygenated blood from its
lungs is reasonably well-separated
from deoxygenated blood
from the rest of its body.

2. What is a “living fossil”?

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an organism (such as a horseshoe crab or a ginkgo tree) that has remained

essentially unchanged from earlier geologic times and whose close relatives are
usually, extinct

3. In the Notebook What characteristics of the lungfish may be evidence of its close
relationship to the ancestors of early land vertebrates?

Lungfish are best known for retaining ancestral

characteristics within the Osteichthyes, including the
ability to breathe air, and ancestral structures within
Sarcopterygii, including the presence of lobed fins with a
well-developed internal skeleton- Lungfish represent the
closest living relatives of the tetrapod.

4. In the Notebook What characteristics of the coelacanth may be evidence of its close
relationship to the ancestors of early land vertebrates?

Coelacanths follow the oldest-known living lineage of

Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and which
means they are more closely related to lungfish and
tetrapods (which includes amphibians, reptiles, birds
and mammals) than to ray-finned fish-

Part 2

5. In the Notebook Complete the chart to show the presence of each gene in each
organism, or paste a copy of the completed table from the notebook.

Organism And1 And2

Ray-finned fish x x
Cartilaginous fish x x
Frog
Chicken
Lungfish x
Coelacanth x x

Part 3 Bird
(chicken)

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Amphibian
6. Complete the cladogram. (frog)
lungfish

Choleacan
Ray- t
finned
Cartilaginous fish
fish

Analyze and Conclude

7. Evaluate Solutions Explain why you put the organisms where you did in the
cladogram.

Its like a time line but with animals in the evolutionary order that is correct, also in time.

Relationships Among Animals • Copyright © by Savvas Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.