Animals

Eight out of every ten animal species on Earth are arthropods

Four out of every five animals on the planet are nematodes

The blue whale is heavier than any dinosaur that ever lived

The largest land animals used bird-like air sacs to lighten their skeletons

The rise of complex animals was physically impossible until ocean oxygen levels rose

Every animal begins life as a hollow sphere of cells called a blastula

Mice use their sense of smell to detect and avoid mating with relatives

Parasitoid wasps use venom to turn their hosts into living nurseries

Hawksbill turtles survive by eating glass-like sponges that are toxic to other animals

Arthropods colonized the land millions of years before the first vertebrates

The ancestor of all land vertebrates was a fish with a functional neck

Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space by turning into glass

Aristotle created the first animal classification system over 2,300 years ago

The modern system of naming species was established by a single 1758 book

The term Metazoa was coined to distinguish multicellular animals from single-celled organisms