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The word animal comes from the Latin noun animal of the same meaning, which is itself derived from Latin animalis 'having breath or soul'. [6] The biological definition includes all members of the kingdom Animalia. [7] In colloquial usage, the term animal is often used to refer only to nonhuman animals.
The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks. A genus contains one or more species. Minor intermediate ranks are not shown. A species (pl.: species) is a population of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. [1]
Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million in total. Animals range in size from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres (110 ft) long and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs.
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.Its aim is to create a comprehensive open content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public.
There are 107 classes of animals in 33 phyla in this list. However, different sources give different numbers of classes and phyla. For example, Protura, Diplura, and Collembola are often considered to be the three orders in the class Entognatha. This list should by no means be considered complete and authoritative and should be used carefully.
In the English language, many animals have different names depending on whether they are male, female, young, domesticated, or in groups. The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans , an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners . [ 1 ]
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The definition was posited because extinct organisms are hardest to classify: they can be offshoots that diverged from a phylum's line before the characters that define the modern phylum were all acquired. By Budd and Jensen's definition, a phylum is defined by a set of characters shared by all its living representatives.