Anatomical comparisons in living organisms also facilitate the scope of classification as per the similarities and differences they have. The main use of comparative anatomy is to trace evolutionary relationships in organisms, and many biologists like Lamarck and Buffon have used it in the past years.
Comparative Anatomy Worksheet Answer Key Pdfl
If you look around outside, you probably see incredible biodiversity, even in your own neighborhood. Insects crawl on plants, avoiding predators like birds and lizards. The birds themselves hide in the trees. How did all these forms of life become so unique from each other? The answer is evolution. Evolution is defined as a genetic change in a population over time. Over millions of years, one single cell evolved into all life we know today. It seems astounding, but scientists have lots of evidence for evolution. One form of that evidence is comparative anatomy - but we'll get to that later.
This all sounds great, but how do we know this really happened millions of years ago? Well, scientists have developed enormous amounts of evidence that evolution occurs. Today, we're going to focus on one type of evidence, comparative anatomy.
Anatomy is the branch of science that deals with studying the structure of living organisms. Comparative anatomy, as the name suggests, involves comparing the anatomies (i.e. body structures) of organisms to understand their relatedness or un-relatedness. In other words, it is the comparative study of the body structures of different species of animals with an aim to understand the changes they have undergone over the years while evolving from a common ancestor.
The field of comparative anatomy helps us understand how organisms evolved by comparing and contrasting their body structure. This concept can be better understood with the following example, illustrated in figure 1. 2ff7e9595c
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