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A protist (/ ˈ p r oʊ t ɪ s t /) is any eukaryotic organism (one with cells containing a nucleus) that is not an animal, plant, or fungus.The protists do not form a natural group, or clade, since they exclude certain eukaryotes with whom they share a common ancestor; [a] but, like algae or invertebrates, the grouping is used for convenience.
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
Systematists today do not treat Protista as a formal taxon, but the term "protist" is still commonly used for convenience in two ways. [22] The most popular contemporary definition is a phylogenetic one, that identifies a paraphyletic group: [23] a protist is any eukaryote that is not an animal, (land) plant, or (true) fungus; this definition [24] excludes many unicellular groups, like the ...
In biology, a biological life cycle (or just life cycle when the biological context is clear) is a series of stages of the life of an organism, that begins as a zygote, often in an egg, and concludes as an adult that reproduces, producing an offspring in the form of a new zygote which then itself goes through the same series of stages, the ...
Marine protists are defined by their habitat as protists that live in marine environments, that is, in the saltwater of seas or oceans or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. Life originated as marine single-celled prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) and later evolved into more complex eukaryotes .
The history of the study of protists has its origins in the 17th century. Since the beginning, the study of protists has been intimately linked to developments in microscopy , which have allowed important advances in the understanding of these organisms due to their generally microscopic nature.
Protists are distributed across all major groups of eukaryotes, including those that contain multicellular algae, green plants, animals, and fungi. If photosynthetic and fungal protists are distinguished from protozoa, they appear as shown in the phylogenetic tree of eukaryotic groups.
The 16-cell Gonium colony shown in the diagram on the right is organized into two concentric squares of respectively 4 and 12 cells, each biflagellated, held together by an extracellular matrix. [51] All flagella point out on the same side: It exhibits a much lower symmetry than Volvox, lacking anterior-posterior symmetry.