ZOOLOGY Meaning | What is ZOOLOGY
ZOOLOGY
Study of Animals
- Zoology is that the branch of biology concerned with the study animals and animal kingdom. It's also called animal biology. The study of zoology includes the interaction of animal kingdom in their ecosystems like classification, habits, structure, embryology, distribution, evolution, and extinct species.
- Zoology is that the division of biology that deals with the animal kingdom. It's the scientific study associated with the whole species of the animal kingdom.
- An Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was a first-person to broadly classify the living things within the 4th century BC. Firstly he divided living things into animals and plants then continued together with his further classifications. Later the words like biology, botany, and zoology came into existence.
- The study of zoology includes animal’s physiology, their behavior, and their interaction with other species in their environment. It's an enormous course that has the distribution of each animal species on earth including extinct animals. Aside from the animal kingdom and ecosystem, zoology also explores the new areas of research.
- Later, Aristotle divided animals into two classes: one with red-blood and another without like insects and crustaceans. Then, he further classified creatures into those that were ready to walk, flow and swim.
- The classification by Aristotle was followed until the 16th century, during the Age of enlightenment; scientists finally began to research closely.
- Now, zoology has become far more complex, where the living things are divided into five kingdoms, in which animal kingdom themselves divided into several smaller categories of Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and, finally, Species.
- These developments were synthesized in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by survival. In the year 1859, Charles Robert Darwin presented the idea of organic evolution alongside its observational evidence.
Study of Zoology
Branches of Zoology
- The study of animal life is ancient, but its scientific incarnation is comparatively modern. Until the comparative anatomical study on morphographs by Hunter and Cuvier, the modern areas of zoological investigations have occurred. Gradually zoology expanded behind the anatomy to include the following sub-disciplines:
- Zoography, it's also called descriptive zoology
- Comparative Zoology
- Soil Zoology
- Mammalogy
- Comparative anatomy
- Herpetology
- Animal physiology
- Entomology
- Behavioral Ecology
- Ornithology
- Ethnology studies animal behavior
- Invertebrate and vertebrate zoology
- Taxonomically oriented disciplines identify and classify species and study the structures and mechanisms specific to those groups.