Take a guided tour of the biology and ancestry of the vertebrates with Professor Lindsay Turnbull from the University of Oxford Want to know more about the group of animals you belong to - the vertebrates - and how we are all descendants of a plucky fish that hauled itself onto land? In this video we discover the fishy ancestor of the vertebrates: a type of lobe-finned fish, which are extremely rare in today's oceans.

We then explore biological scaling rules, which explain why small animals, like mice or hamsters, seem almost bionic when compared to a ponderous giant like an elephant. But vertebrates are all large animals, and their bodies must deliver oxygen and glucose to muscles buried deep within them. This has led to the evolution of some ingenious engineering solutions, like the vertebrate circulatory system.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:19 Titles

00:24 Who are the Vertebrates?

02:01 Fishy Origins

03:31 How Fish made it onto Land

04:34 The Circulatory System - A Vertebrate Invention

06:20 How Animals Get Large

07:51 Why Animals Get Large

09:28 Why the Vertebrates Left the Seas

09:59 Outro