Zoology
Its studies include the structure, embryology, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems.
[2] Although humans have always been interested in the natural history of the animals they saw around them, and used this knowledge to domesticate certain species, the formal study of zoology can be said to have originated with Aristotle.
He viewed animals as living organisms, studied their structure and development, and considered their adaptations to their surroundings and the function of their parts.
The study of animals has largely moved on to deal with form and function, adaptations, relationships between groups, behaviour and ecology.
Cave paintings, engravings and sculptures in France dating back 15,000 years show bison, horses, and deer in carefully rendered detail.
Ancient knowledge of wildlife is illustrated by the realistic depictions of wild and domestic animals in the Near East, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, including husbandry practices and techniques, hunting and fishing.
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle looked at animals as living organisms, studying their structure, development and vital phenomena.
He spent two years on Lesbos, observing and describing the animals and plants, considering the adaptations of different organisms and the function of their parts.
[8] In the 13th century, Albertus Magnus produced commentaries and paraphrases of all Aristotle's works; his books on topics like botany, zoology, and minerals included information from ancient sources, but also the results of his own investigations.
[11][12] During the Renaissance and early modern period, zoological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel organisms.
Prominent in this movement were Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey, who used experimentation and careful observation in physiology, and naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Buffon who began to classify the diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as studying the development and behavior of organisms.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek did pioneering work in microscopy and revealed the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork for cell theory.
Explorer-naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt investigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography, laying the foundations for biogeography, ecology and ethology.
The end of the 19th century saw the fall of spontaneous generation and the rise of the germ theory of disease, though the mechanism of inheritance remained a mystery.
Originally it was thought that species were immutable, but with the arrival of Darwin's theory of evolution, the field of cladistics came into being, studying the relationships between the different groups or clades.
Systematics is the study of the diversification of living forms, the evolutionary history of a group is known as its phylogeny, and the relationship between the clades can be shown diagrammatically in a cladogram.
Since Hunter and Cuvier, comparative anatomical study has been associated with morphography, shaping the modern areas of zoological investigation: anatomy, physiology, histology, embryology, teratology and ethology.
Modern alternative classification systems generally start with the three-domain system: Archaea (originally Archaebacteria); Bacteria (originally Eubacteria); Eukaryota (including protists, fungi, plants, and animals)[26] These domains reflect whether the cells have nuclei or not, as well as differences in the chemical composition of the cell exteriors.
The various taxonomically oriented disciplines i.e. mammalogy, biological anthropology, herpetology, ornithology, and ichthyology seek to identify and classify species and study the structures and mechanisms specific to those groups.
[30] Physiology studies the mechanical, physical, and biochemical processes of living organisms by attempting to understand how all of the structures function as a whole.
Evolutionary research is concerned with the origin and descent of species, as well as their change over time, and includes scientists from many taxonomically oriented disciplines.
[41] Biogeography studies the spatial distribution of organisms on the Earth,[42] focusing on topics like dispersal and migration, plate tectonics, climate change, and cladistics.
It is an integrative field of study, uniting concepts and information from evolutionary biology, taxonomy, ecology, physical geography, geology, paleontology and climatology.
[43] The origin of this field of study is widely accredited to Alfred Russel Wallace, a British biologist who had some of his work jointly published with Charles Darwin.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA and the interactions within the molecule, and this publication jump-started research into molecular biology and increased interest in the subject.
