Zoology (from Greek ζῷον, zoon, "animal" + λόγος, "logos", "knowledge") is the branch of biology concerned with the study of animals.
Contents[hide]
1 Name
2 Systems of classification
3 Subfields of zoology
4 Notable zoologists
5 See also
6 Sources and external links
7 References
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Name
The pronunciation of "zoology" is /zoʊˈɑləʤɪ/; however, an alternative pronunciation is /zuˈɑləʤɪ/.[1] The word zoology originates from the Greek zōon, meaning animal, and logos, meaning study. an example of a sub ology is herpetology-the study of snakes.
Systems of classification
Main article: Scientific classification
Linnaeus's table of the Animal Kingdom from the first edition of Systema Naturae (1735).
Morphography includes the systematic exploration and tabulation of the facts involved in the recognition of all the recent and extinct kinds of animals and their distribution in space and time. (1) The museum-makers of old days and their modern representatives the curators and describers of zoological collections, (2) early explorers and modern naturalist travelers and writers comprise zoo-geography, and (3) collectors of fossils and palaeontologists are the chief varieties of zoological workers coming under this heading. Gradually, since the time of Hunter and Cuvier, anatomical study has associated itself with the more superficial morphography until today no one considers a study of animal form of any value which does not include internal structure, histology and embryology in its scope.
Subfields of zoology
The study of animal life is, of course, ancient: but as 'zoology' it is relatively modern, for what we call biology was known as 'natural history' at the start of the nineteenth century. During the lifetime of Charles Darwin, natural history turned from a gentlemanly pursuit to a modern scientific activity. Zoology as we know it was first established in German and British universities. The institution of zoology training in British universities was mainly established by Thomas Henry Huxley. His ideas were centered on the morphology of animals: he himself is considered by many to have been the greatest comparative anatomist of the second half of the nineteenth century. His courses were composed of lectures and laboratory practical classes; and his system became widely spread.
There was much left out by Huxley, especially the study of animals in their environment, which had been the main stimulus for both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (who both came up with the idea of natural selection). The fact that neither Darwin nor Wallace ever held a university teaching post may have contributed to this rather startling omission. Gradually Huxley's comparative anatomy was supplemented by other much-needed methods. The field of zoology in the twentieth century mainly comprised these approaches:
Comparative anatomy studies the structure of animals.
The physiology of animals is studied under various fields including anatomy and embryology
The common genetic and developmental mechanisms of animals and plants is studied in molecular biology, molecular genetics and developmental biology
Ethology is the study of animal behavior.
The ecology of animals is covered under behavioral ecology and other fields
Evolutionary biology of both animals and plants is considered in the articles on evolution, population genetics, heredity, variation, Mendelism, reproduction.
Systematics, cladistics, phylogenetics, phylogeography, biogeography and taxonomy classify and group species via common descent and regional associations.
The various taxonomically-oriented disciplines such as mammalogy, herpetology, ornithology identify and classify species, and study the structures and mechanisms specific to those groups. Entomology is the study of insects, by far the largest group of animals.
Palaeontology, including all that may be learnt of ancient environments.
Notable zoologists
Main article: List of zoologists
In alphabetical order by surname:
Louis Agassiz (malacology, ichthyology)
Aristotle
David Attenborough
Henry Walter Bates (Batesian mimicry, Amazon)
Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre
Rachel Carson (marine biologist)
Archie Carr (Herpetology, esp. sea turtles)
Archie Carr III, (wild mammals)
Eugenie Clark (Ichthyology)
Jeff Corwin (herpetology)
Georges Cuvier (founder of comparative morphology)
Charles Darwin (theory of evolution, natural selection, sexual selection)
Richard Dawkins (ethology, evolutionary biology)
James R. Dixon (Herpetology)
William Flower (mammals)
Edmund Brisco Ford (ecological genetics)
Dian Fossey (primatology)
Birutė Galdikas (primatology)
Jane Goodall (primatology)
Ernst Haeckel (marine biologist), (naturalist)
Victor Hensen (planktology)
Bernard Heuvelmans (cryptozoology)
Julian Huxley (evolutionary synthesis, humanism, World Wildlife Fund, UNESCO)
Thomas Henry Huxley (evolution, agnosticism, science education
Al-Jahiz
William Kirby (father of entomology)
Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke (ornithology, herpetology)
E. Ray Lankester (zoology and comparative anatomy)
Carolus Linnaeus (father of systematics; primarily a botanist)
Konrad Lorenz (ethology)
David W. Macdonald (wild mammals)
John Maynard Smith (evolutionary biology, genetics)
Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biology)
Fritz Müller (evolutionary biology, Müllerian mimicry, Brazil)
Desmond Morris (ethology)
Richard Owen (vertebrate palaeontology, dinosaurs, Natural History Museum)
Roger Tory Peterson (ornithology)
Eric Pianka (herpetologist)
William Emerson Ritter (marine biology)
Thomas Say (entomology)
Shen Kuo (medieval Chinese zoologist)
Su Song (medieval Chinese zoologist)
Dave Salmoni
ll (animal behavior, invertebrate zoology)
Ernst Freiherr von Blomberg (anthrozoology and religion)
Alfred Russel Wallace (natural selection, zoogeography, animal colouration, Amazon, East Indies)
E.O. Wilson (entomology, especially ants, founder of sociobiology)
Robert Broom
Austin Stevens (herpetology, especially snakes
Saravana and other serpents.
See also
Zoological distribution
Zootomy - the study of animal anatomy or animal dissection
Cryptozoology - the study of animals who currently fall outside the parameters of zoology
Paleontology - the study life in the past
Oceanography - the study of the oceans
Entomology - the area of biology that studies insects
Malacology and conchology, the study of mollusks, and their shells
Botany - the area of biology that studies plants
Microtomy
List of zoologists
Important Publications in Zoology
Anthrozoology
Animals in Buddhism
Islam and animals
Timeline of zoology
History of zoology (through 1859)
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Veterinary Dictionary: zoology Top
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The biology of animals.
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Science Dictionary: zoology Top
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(zoh-ol-uh-jee)
The scientific study and classification of animals. (See Linnean classification.)
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Home > Library > Science > Science Dictionary
(zoh-ol-uh-jee)
The scientific study and classification of animals. (See Linnean classification.)
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History 1450-1789: Zoology Top
History 1450-1789: Zoology Top
Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > History 1450-1789
For much of the sixteenth century, as in earlier periods, animals were valued for use or for their symbolic or allegorical meaning. Medieval bestiaries, based on the Natural History of Pliny and the encyclopedic works of such early church fathers as Isidore of Seville, mingled naturalistic description, uses, and symbolic significance in their accounts of animals, and did not clearly demarcate real from mythological beasts. Conrad Gessner's Historia Animalium (Description of animals) of 1551, the era's most comprehensive text on animals, continued this mode of description, still evident fifty years later in Edward Topsell's revised translation, A History of Four-Footed Beastes (1607). Animals were classified in hierarchical terms centered on the notion of the great chain of being. However, the voyages of discovery and the intellectual changes associated with the scientific revolution began to strip away the layers of symbol and allegory from animals and made them objects of study in themselves.
Animals had been used as surrogates for humans in the training of physicians and surgeons since the twelfth century. Even after human dissection began to be practiced in the fourteenth century, medical schools continued to use animals, especially pigs, dogs, and cats, to teach human anatomy by means of both dissection and vivisection. The beginnings of comparative anatomy are usually dated to the appearance in 1551 of Pierre Belon's (1517–1564) work on the anatomy of cetaceans, soon followed by his comparison of a human skeleton to that of a bird (1555). Volker Coiter (1534–1576) established comparative anatomy as an autonomous field of study in the 1570s, and while animals continued to function as human proxies, numerous works appeared on animal anatomy and physiology as well.
Exotic animals were a form of diplomatic exchange dating back to Roman times. Medieval monarchs established menageries such as that at the Tower of London, which during the sixteenth century included lions, leopards, a tiger, a lynx, an eagle, and a porcupine. Animals in menageries were often used for sport in the form of animal combats or baiting. Louis XIV of France established a menagerie at his palace at Versailles; when the animals died, they were dissected before the Paris Academy of Sciences, and many of them were described in Claude Perrault's (1613–1688) Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–1676; Memoirs for a natural history of animals). After death, these animals graced natural history cabinets (among which Gessner's was famous), which also included plants, antiquities, minerals, and curiosities. These predecessors of the modern natural history museum attempted to make sense of a rapidly expanding world by means of analogies, etymologies, and seemingly odd juxtapositions and also served important social and cultural roles in an aristocratic society based on status and patronage.
The work of Perrault's team and others such as Edward Tyson (1651–1708) made great strides in comparative anatomy. However, the main use of animals in science from the end of the sixteenth century onward was to demonstrate aspects of human (and animal) anatomy and physiology, for instruction and especially for research. William Harvey (1578–1657) demonstrated the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, by means of hundreds of experiments on live animals ranging from fish to dogs. Experimenters in universities and academies all over Europe embraced Harvey's experimental techniques, which included injection and inflation as well as vivisection. Notable examples included the work of Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) on the structure of the lungs and the capillary circulation, Robert Hooke (1635–1704) on the process of respiration, Regnier de Graaf (1641–1673) on the glands, and Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) on the structure of the muscles. Hooke and Robert Boyle (1627–1691) placed small animals in a vacuum pump of their design and demonstrated the body's need for fresh air to sustain life. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) revealed the possibilities of the microscope, also used successfully by Malpighi and Hooke.
Most seventeenth-century natural philosophers regarded animals as machines, although few went as far as René Descartes (1596–1650) in denying their mental capacity to experience pain. Vitalist philosophies revived in the eighteenth century, although the mechanical philosophy continued to influence views of animal function. The work of Stephen Hales (1671–1767) on blood pressure was mechanistic, but by mid-century, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) exemplified the new emphasis on vital function with his work on the sensibility and irritability of the nerves. At the beginning of his 1752 treatise on this topic, Haller also displayed a new sensibility toward animals when he apologized for causing them pain.
By the end of the seventeenth century, concepts of classification had reached a crisis. The seemingly chaotic organization of cabinets and collections reflected a lack of consensus on classification schemes. The great influx of animals from the New World and other areas disrupted the old notion of a chain of being that was both full and complete, but there was little agreement about what might be a proper criterion for classification. Although Aristotle had attempted to establish a natural system of classification based on essential features and natural affinities, he also believed in a natural hierarchy. Various theories of plant classification multiplied, but the classification of animals lagged behind. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Ray (1627–1705) attempted a natural classification of animals, but its complexity did not bode well for future endeavors. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) described a classification of plants based on sexual parts in his Systema Naturae (System of nature), which also presented a scheme for classifying animals, organizing them in six broad classes. In the 1779 edition of Systema Naturae, he described nearly six thousand species of animals. His system was artificial, aimed at establishing order rather than reproducing nature's plan, and its use of the binomial nomenclature was widely adopted.
Linnaeus's system of classification was challenged by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788), whose Histoire naturelle (1749–1788; Natural history) was the most comprehensive (and best-known) work on natural history in the eighteenth century. Buffon argued that any system of classification was by definition arbitrary and artificial, and that reality resided in individuals, not in species. While he modified his views over the course of his life, adopting many Linnaean categories, Buffon is especially important for introducing the concept of time into the discussion of taxonomy, finding variability of species over time but constancy of form at higher taxonomic levels.
By the end of the eighteenth century, animals had lost much of their earlier symbolic meaning. But in both laboratories and natural history museums they were, more than ever, objects of scientific scrutiny.
Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > History 1450-1789
For much of the sixteenth century, as in earlier periods, animals were valued for use or for their symbolic or allegorical meaning. Medieval bestiaries, based on the Natural History of Pliny and the encyclopedic works of such early church fathers as Isidore of Seville, mingled naturalistic description, uses, and symbolic significance in their accounts of animals, and did not clearly demarcate real from mythological beasts. Conrad Gessner's Historia Animalium (Description of animals) of 1551, the era's most comprehensive text on animals, continued this mode of description, still evident fifty years later in Edward Topsell's revised translation, A History of Four-Footed Beastes (1607). Animals were classified in hierarchical terms centered on the notion of the great chain of being. However, the voyages of discovery and the intellectual changes associated with the scientific revolution began to strip away the layers of symbol and allegory from animals and made them objects of study in themselves.
Animals had been used as surrogates for humans in the training of physicians and surgeons since the twelfth century. Even after human dissection began to be practiced in the fourteenth century, medical schools continued to use animals, especially pigs, dogs, and cats, to teach human anatomy by means of both dissection and vivisection. The beginnings of comparative anatomy are usually dated to the appearance in 1551 of Pierre Belon's (1517–1564) work on the anatomy of cetaceans, soon followed by his comparison of a human skeleton to that of a bird (1555). Volker Coiter (1534–1576) established comparative anatomy as an autonomous field of study in the 1570s, and while animals continued to function as human proxies, numerous works appeared on animal anatomy and physiology as well.
Exotic animals were a form of diplomatic exchange dating back to Roman times. Medieval monarchs established menageries such as that at the Tower of London, which during the sixteenth century included lions, leopards, a tiger, a lynx, an eagle, and a porcupine. Animals in menageries were often used for sport in the form of animal combats or baiting. Louis XIV of France established a menagerie at his palace at Versailles; when the animals died, they were dissected before the Paris Academy of Sciences, and many of them were described in Claude Perrault's (1613–1688) Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–1676; Memoirs for a natural history of animals). After death, these animals graced natural history cabinets (among which Gessner's was famous), which also included plants, antiquities, minerals, and curiosities. These predecessors of the modern natural history museum attempted to make sense of a rapidly expanding world by means of analogies, etymologies, and seemingly odd juxtapositions and also served important social and cultural roles in an aristocratic society based on status and patronage.
The work of Perrault's team and others such as Edward Tyson (1651–1708) made great strides in comparative anatomy. However, the main use of animals in science from the end of the sixteenth century onward was to demonstrate aspects of human (and animal) anatomy and physiology, for instruction and especially for research. William Harvey (1578–1657) demonstrated the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, by means of hundreds of experiments on live animals ranging from fish to dogs. Experimenters in universities and academies all over Europe embraced Harvey's experimental techniques, which included injection and inflation as well as vivisection. Notable examples included the work of Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) on the structure of the lungs and the capillary circulation, Robert Hooke (1635–1704) on the process of respiration, Regnier de Graaf (1641–1673) on the glands, and Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) on the structure of the muscles. Hooke and Robert Boyle (1627–1691) placed small animals in a vacuum pump of their design and demonstrated the body's need for fresh air to sustain life. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) revealed the possibilities of the microscope, also used successfully by Malpighi and Hooke.
Most seventeenth-century natural philosophers regarded animals as machines, although few went as far as René Descartes (1596–1650) in denying their mental capacity to experience pain. Vitalist philosophies revived in the eighteenth century, although the mechanical philosophy continued to influence views of animal function. The work of Stephen Hales (1671–1767) on blood pressure was mechanistic, but by mid-century, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) exemplified the new emphasis on vital function with his work on the sensibility and irritability of the nerves. At the beginning of his 1752 treatise on this topic, Haller also displayed a new sensibility toward animals when he apologized for causing them pain.
By the end of the seventeenth century, concepts of classification had reached a crisis. The seemingly chaotic organization of cabinets and collections reflected a lack of consensus on classification schemes. The great influx of animals from the New World and other areas disrupted the old notion of a chain of being that was both full and complete, but there was little agreement about what might be a proper criterion for classification. Although Aristotle had attempted to establish a natural system of classification based on essential features and natural affinities, he also believed in a natural hierarchy. Various theories of plant classification multiplied, but the classification of animals lagged behind. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Ray (1627–1705) attempted a natural classification of animals, but its complexity did not bode well for future endeavors. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) described a classification of plants based on sexual parts in his Systema Naturae (System of nature), which also presented a scheme for classifying animals, organizing them in six broad classes. In the 1779 edition of Systema Naturae, he described nearly six thousand species of animals. His system was artificial, aimed at establishing order rather than reproducing nature's plan, and its use of the binomial nomenclature was widely adopted.
Linnaeus's system of classification was challenged by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788), whose Histoire naturelle (1749–1788; Natural history) was the most comprehensive (and best-known) work on natural history in the eighteenth century. Buffon argued that any system of classification was by definition arbitrary and artificial, and that reality resided in individuals, not in species. While he modified his views over the course of his life, adopting many Linnaean categories, Buffon is especially important for introducing the concept of time into the discussion of taxonomy, finding variability of species over time but constancy of form at higher taxonomic levels.
By the end of the eighteenth century, animals had lost much of their earlier symbolic meaning. But in both laboratories and natural history museums they were, more than ever, objects of scientific scrutiny.
Zoology definition
Traditionally, the first syllable of zoology has been pronounced as (ō), rhyming with toe. However, most likely due to the familiarity of the word zoo (which is merely a shortened form of zoological garden), the pronunciation of the first syllable as (ū) is also commonly heard. In 1999, 88 percent of the Panelists found the (zō-) pronunciation acceptable, and 60 percent found the (zū-) pronunciation acceptable, with 68 percent using the (zō-) pronunciation and 32 percent using the (zū-) pronunciation in their own speech. Thus, while both pronunciations can be considered acceptable, the (zō-) pronunciation may be perceived as more correct.
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