Bony or Boneless?

HOW LONG?!
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• We can tell from fossils that living things

have been on Earth for over three billion
(3,000,000,000) years. Those living things
were not like you and me. They were very
small and made of only one cell. A cell is the
smallest part of any living thing, and a human
being has trillions of cells, so you can see how
small those living things were. Even though
they were tiny, they were alive.
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Our Ancestors

• Those tiny things were the ancestors of all

living things today. We say that all life has
evolved from them. Evolution is a word
meaning change in living things over
long periods of time, producing new
kinds of living things.

Q u ic k T im e ª a n d a
d e c o m p re sso r
a r e n e e d e d t o s e e t h is p ic t u r e .
A Sponge? Are you
serious?
700 million (700,000,000) years ago, the
first animal did not look like a dog or a
cat. It was a sponge, a thing without
a brain or nerves or a backbone.
It sat on the bottom of the ocean and ate
bits of food in the water, but it was an
animal. Maybe that does not sound like
an animal to you, but it does to a
zoologist.
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To a scientist, an animal is a living thing,

made of many cells, that can move (at
least part of its life) and must eat other
living things.

Animals are one of the five kingdoms

of living things.
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Close your eyes.
Think of a dog.
• Did you think of a retriever, a chihuahua, a
golden retriever, or a beagle? All of these are
dogs. They are very closely related, even
though they look different. All dogs are the
same species.

• A species is a group of living things that is

closely related and can have young together.
 Organizing animals into
groups is called
classification, and it is an
important science skill.
Scientists classify living
things according to how
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they are related, using

many different clues. If they
see that kangaroos and
elephants both have hair
and feed milk to their
young, they group both
kangaroos and elephants as
mammals.
 Animals are classified
into TWO large main
groups.
• 98 out of 100 types of
animals in the world today
are INVERTEBRATES, like a
sponge, because they do not
have backbones.
• Animals with backbones are
called VERTEBRATES, and
they have only been around
for about 500 million years.
 Invertebrate
s like insects
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are the most
common type
of animal on
Earth
 Why are people so
interested in
vertebrates, when there
are so few of them?
Vertebrate animals are a
big part of human life.
Humans have dogs and cats
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as pets, they ride horses,
they feed squirrels, and
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they raise cows for meat.

And, vertebrates can be
much bigger than
invertebrates, so they are
easier to see.
 Any other reasons?
Oh yeah, human beings
are vertebrates, related
to all the other
vertebrates. If you feel
your back, you can feel
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the center. That is your
backbone.

The history of
vertebrate animals is
the history of you and
me.
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• Vertebrates are divided into five main

classes: fish, amphibians, reptiles,
birds, and mammals. All of these are
animals because they move around, are
made of many cells, and eat other living or
once-living things. They ALL have
backbones.
 Teacher Websites:
• http://www.dmturner.org/Teacher/Libra
• http://std2groupinganimals.blogspot.co
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Task
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• Your teacher will now pass out a sheet

with pictures of animals, all jumbled
up. Your task is to separate out the
vertebrates from the invertebrates and
present your findings on a poster.