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Readings

Excerpts from the Shape of Life book

Readings

  • Closeup of orange sponge
    Reading
    Sponges: Animal Eve, Where Do Organisms Come From?

    I'm obsessed with learning where we came from. And what I mean by that is not who your mother and father are, or your grandparents, but rather where do the organisms come from that gave rise to complex animals like us.

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  • Polyps with purple tips
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    Cnidarians: The Polyp and Medusa, Life on the Move

    Millions of years ago, unlikely pioneers sparked a revolution. Cnidarians set animal life in motion. So much of what we take for granted today began with Cnidarians.

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  • Black and yellow flatworm
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    Flatworms: Getting Ahead, An Explosion of Life

    When you collect marine animals, there are certain flatworms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of seawater.

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  • Yellow annelid
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    Annelids: The Next Segment, an Explosion of Life

    What i like doing the most is actually getting out, getting down, getting dirty in the mud with the worms themselves. Getting out there whether it's pouring rain, whether it's a low tide at dawn, I don't care. I just like to be out there with the worms, seeing them in their own habitat.

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  • Closeup of crab
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    Marine Arthropods: A Successful Design, The Limbed Creature Advantage

    Whether one rates success in terms of numbers, number of species, range of habitats exploited or simply as a total mass of animal tissue, the limbed creatures clearly have the advantage.

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  • Closeup of bee in flower
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    Terrestrial Arthropods: The Conquerers Come Ashore

    Life's transition from sea to the land was perhaps as much of an evolutionary challenge as genesis. What forms of life were able to make such a drastic change in lifestyle?

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  • Closeup of suckers from tentacle of octopus
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    Molluscs: Armor and Speed, the Survival Game

    "As the tide rises, the closed molluscs opens a fraction to the ocean's food, bathed in its riches. Do not ask what force would do, or if force could. A knife is no use against a fortress."

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  • Starfish that are blue, yellow, purple
    Reading
    Echinoderms: Give me Five, an Ultimate Animal

    "If there are animals from another planet already here, they're probably starfish."

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  • School of fish
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    Chordates: The Voyage to Us Bones, Brawn, and Brains

    "Humanity is exalted, not because we are so far above every other living creature, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life." - E.O. Wilson, Biophilia

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  • Earth from space
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    Cambrian Explosion: A BIG BANG in the Evolution of Animals

    For most of Earth's early history, there simply was no fossil record. Only recently have we come to discover otherwise: Life is virtually as old as the planet itself, and even the most ancient sedimentary rocks have yielded fossilized remains of primitive forms of life.

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