Crash Course Zoology (2021)
Crash Course Zoology
2021This fourteen-episode series takes a rapid deep dive into the weird and wonderful biology of animals, guiding us across the tree of life as we endeavor to answer what makes an animal an animal anyway? Explore the current state of the world and how it's evolving with in-depth looks at particular animals, showing how the science is applied.
Seasons & Episode
In the inaugural episode, we endeavor to answer just what an animal is, because as it turns out, it’s complicated! But before we get there we’ll need to introduce you to zoology more broadly, tell you about taxonomy (the branch of science dedicated to naming and describing organisms), and then we’ll get to phylogenetics (which looks at traits, evolutionary history, and relationships among living things).
In this episode, we try to figure out what an “average” animal would really look like - its size, what it eats, how many legs it has, if it even has a head, if it flies or walks or swims, you get the idea. And what we’ll find might just surprise you. But what we’ll also discover along the way is that what we think of as average is based on what we know and there is so much animal life still to be identified.
In this episode, we take a look at the various ways animals can grow, learn how and why some animals evolved to have a head and others evolved to not have a head, and examine the different types of skeletons - from those inside bodies (like our own), to skeletons outside bodies (like in insects), and even those made of water (like in jellyfish).
Today we're going to take a closer look at brains, how animals use them, and how some animals have even evolved to lose them! It turns out a brain (and intelligence more broadly) isn't easy to define, but what we do know for sure is that brains have evolved over time in response to the challenges in an animals' environment. And what we'll find is that sometimes it's much smarter to have a tiny, simple brain than a big, complicated one!
Today we're going to talk about what an ear even is, how ears have evolved, how they work, and some of the cool ways animals have tweaked their ears to work for their lifestyle. So perk up whatever you use for hearing because we're going to be sending vibrations your way for the next 10ish minutes!
In today’s episode of Crash Course Zoology we’re going to solve some phylogenetic mysteries! There are so many more questions we have yet to answer in Zoology so grab some fossils, fire up the DNA sequences, and bring your best hypothesis as we try to figure out where all the baby eels are, explain why spiders seem so lonely, and decide once and for all if horseshoe crabs are arachnids!
Today, in the penultimate episode of Crash Course Zoology, we're going to use everything we've learned so far to try and figure out what a "species" even is anyway! As you'll see, the incredible diversity of animals makes it really difficult to fit animals into neat categories so scientists have employed a variety of approaches to categorizing animals.
This fourteen-episode series takes a rapid deep dive into the weird and wonderful biology of animals, guiding us across the tree of life as we endeavor to answer what makes an animal an animal anyway? Explore the current state of the world and how it's evolving with in-depth looks at particular animals, showing how the science is applied.