User:Justin/Sandbox/Zoology



Zoology (from Greek: ζῴον, zoion, "animal"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the biological discipline which involves the study of animals. Zoology examines the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of animals. While there are many disciplines within zoology, the majority fall within one of two fundamental focuses: a particular taxonomic group, or attributes common to most animals. Each of these two groups are further divided, based on the specific area of research and study.

While zoology has historical roots dating back to 400 BC, the first attempt at the classification of animals was by Aristotle in Historia Animalium. In the 18th Century, Carolus Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, introducing the system of scientific classification, still in use today.

Branches of modern zoology
The two foundations of zoology can be subdivided into specific areas of study.

Taxonomic oriented study
Taxonomic focused studies, research specific divisions within the animal kingdom.

Morphology
The term morphology in biology refers to the outward appearance (shape, structure, color, pattern) of an organism or taxon and its component parts. This is in contrast to physiology, which deals primarily with function.

Also in use is the term "gross morphology", which refers to the prominent or principal aspects of an organism or taxon's morphology. A description of an organism's gross morphology would include, for example, its overall shape, overall colour, main markings etc. but not finer details.

Most taxa differ morphologically from other taxa. Typically closely related taxa differ much less than more distantly related ones, but there are exceptions to this. Cryptic species are species which look very similar, or perhaps even outwardly identical, but are reproductively isolated. Conversely, sometimes unrelated taxa acquire similar appearance through convergent evolution or even through mimicry. A further problem with relying on morphological data is that what may appear, morphologically speaking, to be two distinct species, may in fact be shown by DNA analysis to be a single species.

Physiology
Physiology is the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions of living organisms.

Ethology
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior.

Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behavior through the centuries, the modern science of ethology is usually considered to have arisen as a discrete discipline with the work in the 1920s of biologists Nikolaas Tinbergen of The Netherlands and Konrad Lorenz of Austria. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with strong ties to certain other disciplines — e.g., neuroanatomy, ecology, evolution. The ethologist, a scientist who practices ethology, is interested in the behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group and often studies one type of behavior (e.g., aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.

The desire to understand the animal world has made ethology a rapidly growing field, and since the turn of the 21st century, many prior understandings related to diverse fields such as animal communication, personal symbolic name use, animal emotions, animal culture and learning, and even sexual conduct, long thought to be well understood, have been revolutionized, as have new fields such as neuroethology.

Embryology
Embryology is the study of the development of an embryo. An embryo is defined as any vertebrate in a stage before birth or hatching. Embryology is more specific as it only encompasses the modern definition: an animal that is undergoing early development including the formation of primitive organ systems, the creation of fundamental tissues, and cleavage; especially involving the development of human individuals from the moment the blastocyst is implanted until the end of the eight week after conception. Past the eight week, the developing animal is called a fetus.

Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of systems of living organisms and the interactions among organisms and between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors such as insolation (sunlight), climate, and geology, and biotic factors, which are other organisms that share its habitat.

Evolutionary biology
Evolutionary biology is a sub-field of biology concerned with the origin and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication, and diversity over time. One who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist.

Evolutionary biology is an interdisciplinary field because it includes scientists from a wide range of both field and lab oriented disciplines. For example, it generally includes scientists who may have a specialist training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, or herpetology, but use those organisms as case studies to answer general questions in evolution. It also generally includes paleontologists and geologists who use fossils to answer questions about the tempo and mode of evolution, as well as theoreticians in areas such as population genetics and evolutionary psychology. In the 1990s developmental biology made a re-entry into evolutionary biology from its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.