Homework Help: Science: Biology: Vertebrates

If you've already read our report on invertebrates, you can make a fairly good guess on what vertebrates are. Vertebrates are all the living things that have backbones, just like you and me! Only a small fraction of the world's living things are vertebrates, specifically, just over 45,000 different species.

To further emphasize how small of the worlds livings things are vertebrates, only five different phyla have been created for all of the vertebrates of the world. They are the fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. All vertebrates have skin, a skeleton, muscles, blood, a way of getting oxygen, and either fins of legs.

All vertebrates are either warm-blooded or cold-blooded. Warm-blooded means that the animal's body temperature stays the same no matter what the temperature of its surroundings are. Most warm-blooded animals sweat to cool off, or gain fat to keep warm. Examples of warm-blooded animals are the dog, rabbit, elaphant, and even human beings.

On the other hand, cold-blooded animals' body temperatures change depending on their surroundings. In other words, if a cold-blooded animal's surroundings are cold, then the animal's body temperature will become cold as well.

When hearing the differences between warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals, some may think that they would prefer to be cold-blooded than warm-blooded. In fact, this is very untrue. As a cold-blooded animal, if your surroundings get hot, than you instantly feel hot outside and inside your body. As a warm-blooded animal, if the surroundings become hot, you will only feel the heat from the outside, but your whole body's termparature will not instantly increase.

Homework Help: Science: Biology

For Further Reading

Download

###

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z