Take a whistle-stop tour of the Animal Kingdom with Professor Lindsay Turnbull from the University of Oxford Everyone can name a few animals - but did you know that most familiar animals only come from one group - and there's more than 30 to choose from?! In this video we discover the probable ancestor of the animals - a strange type of eukaryotic cell that fed on bacteria. But around 540 million years ago the animals experienced a burst of creativity, and a whole range of different animals sprang into being in the blink of a geological eye. We take a look at a few of the major groups - including arthropods, annelid worms and molluscs - which all play host to thousands of species.

Image Credit:

Cartwright et al (2007), Exceptionally Preserved Jellyfishes from the Middle Cambrian

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001121

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:14 Titles

00:18 When the Animals Go Marching

02:01 What Makes an Animal an Animal?

04:17 The Jelly Animals

06:00 How Muscles Have Evolved

07:45 Lines of Symmetry

09:48 Chordates - How Our Ancestor Evolved

11:33 Outro