Hi there bug lovers and welcome to today's show! We're beginning a new venture here on Arthro-Pod that focuses on our namesake phylum, Arthropoda! If you listen to these episodes you will gain a greater understanding of what makes an arthropod an arthropod, how we differentiate something like a lobster from a butterfly, and why we must understand this large group of animals! Today's show features Michael Skvarla and we chat about the defining traits of arthropods, what a phylum is, and how arthropods have become so successful! Tune in! One big happy phylum! Photos by Jim Kalisch; UNL Entomology Show notes What is a phylum? The Burgess Shale is paramount to our understanding of arthropod history. If you would like to learn more about the shale please visit here. You can also visit this page to see specimens that have been extracted from the shale. Here is a short timeline of life on Earth if you are interested The phylogeny of arthropods Things other than basketball can have brackets!From Regeir et al 2010 Possibility of Pancrustacea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634985/  Questions? Comments?  Email: [email protected] the show on TwitterGet the show through iTunes!Subscribe to our feed on Feedburner!  We're on Stitcher too! Thanks for listening! This episode is freely available on archive.org and is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Beginning/ending theme: "There It Is" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0