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Metazoa
Walk the Tree
Eighteen stops. Done stays on the stop. No points.
Stamps on this device
None yet. A phylum, a class, or a finished stop leaves a plate here. Nothing is sent.
How this works
- Textbook map of Animalia for a course: classic ranks, not a live cladogram, and not a species list.
- Scene is a place to picture. The paragraph under it is the textbook point. Trait chips are the words used to compare: symmetry, tissues, body cavity, embryo, molting, segments, support, where it lives, and one signature feature.
- Tap a chip to highlight nested groups that use that same label. At the end of a branch, the tap lists a few other groups marked the same way.
- Compare two groups is the button on the open group. The amber block holds this group against a second one: shared path, the trait labels that differ, then one to three sentences on what that means. Those sentences are a teacher's aside: the embryo for a human and an octopus, tissues for a sponge and a jellyfish, the legs and the wing covers for a beetle and a millipede. The same voice covers whale and manatee, bat and bird, frog and fish, bird and reptile (the map keeps two classes; modern trees do not), insect and spider, turtle and snail shells, earthworm and roundworm, starfish and brittle star, penguin and fish, and bat and moth wings. It also covers ray-fins and lobe-fins, bone and cartilage in fishes, a pouch and a placenta, an egg and a pouch, a comb jelly and a cnidarian, an insect and a crustacean, a sea squirt and a lancelet, a hagfish and a lamprey, and an octopus against another mollusc. If the plan matches, likeness comes first. Suggested pairs are still human and octopus, sponge and jellyfish, beetle and millipede.
- Where does this belong? is optional and collapsed at the bottom of a group. Five animals, one at a time, each with four groups. Each set includes an insect, a mammal, and a bird. A short correction, then the next. No score. It works with no network.
- Also on this textbook map. Tunicates and lancelets are chordate subphyla beside Vertebrata. Hagfishes and lampreys are jawless classes. Hagfish vertebrae are reduced or absent, so some courses use Craniata for skull-bearing animals and start Vertebrata at the lampreys. Velvet worms sit next to arthropods. With tardigrades they are panarthropods, noted in the text and not drawn as a separate branch. Hemichordates, including acorn worms, sit with the deuterostomes. Rotifers, bryozoans, brachiopods, and ribbon worms sit with the lophotrochozoans. Arrow worms are parked under protostomes, and that placement is still argued. Priapulids sit with the molting animals. Nematode classes here are the traditional Secernentea and Adenophorea. Flatworms include monogeneans.
- Search matches common names, Latin, and aliases. Bug means Hemiptera. Jellyfish lands on cnidarians. Human opens primates, with mammals still on the path. Enter opens the top hit. Escape clears. If the top hit is an everyday name, an animal filed there, or a sentence rather than the group title, one quiet line says so.
- On the open group. Under the plate, one sentence says why this stop is its own, set beside a sibling’s mark. Next on the trail shows two to four nested scenes you can tap. The full list stays below. Compare with … opens the amber block already paired: a classroom pair when you are standing on that group, otherwise the next group beside it. If you opened this group earlier in the same tab, a short note says so. Walk the Tree, under Discover, is eighteen stops in five chapters: First bodies, Three worms, The molt, Sea to spine, and Look again. The stops are a sponge, a jellyfish, a snail, a flatworm, an earthworm, a roundworm, a ring against a tube, an arthropod that molts, insects, a beetle beside a millipede, a sea star, a sea squirt, a backbone, a bat and a bird, a whale and a manatee, ray-fins against lobe-fins, a bird against a reptile, and a pouch against a placenta. A jellyfish stop is a cnidarian, not a comb jelly. A snail stop is a gastropod, not every mollusc. The backbone stop is the Vertebrata page, not every animal filed under it. Find something that molts is an arthropod with the cuticle label. A roundworm, a velvet worm, a tardigrade, or a priapulid does not mark it. Meet an earthworm is the earthworm page. The ring-and-tube compare does not mark that stop. Compare ray-fins and lobe-fins is those two subclasses only. Compare a bird and a reptile is Birds against Reptiles, not a bat and not a crocodile page by itself. Compare a pouch and a placenta is Marsupials against Primates. Opening one side does not mark those three stops. A link ending in #/walk/ and a stop id opens that stop. A stop opens a group, a trait chip, or a compare. Done stays on the stop. Numbered stamps fill along the walk. A chapter says Done, and the first time it finishes, one quiet line says so. No points and no levels. Stamps collect the phyla and classes you open, plus the animals a quest names. They stay on this device only. Nothing is saved to an account, and nothing is sent.
- Explore steps down the tree. Under the plate, one row offers Up to the parent, and either Into the only nested group or Explore nested groups, which moves to Next on the trail when that row is there. The path is Latin, back toward Animalia, and each ancestor on it carries a small drawing. Tap the drawing or the name to step back up. Chordata opens into sea squirts, lancelets, and vertebrates, not vertebrates alone. Jawless classes, hagfishes and lampreys, sit on the vertebrate page beside the six jawed classes. Insect orders stay, including the true bugs.
- Discover jumps to a concrete group, not an empty teaching grade, and not a kingdom or a superphylum. It lands on a scene, then why it is cool, then the path. It leans toward a breach, a reef, a tide, or a wing, and it still will not stay inside one phylum or the same few groups.
- Drawings are teaching illustrations, one file per group at art/<id>.svg. Each shows the animal and picks out the trait its group is known for in a highlight color: the eight plates of a chiton, the notochord of a lancelet, the cloven hoof of a deer. The same colors mark the path and the child cards: sponges lilac, radiates coral, molting animals amber, lophotrochozoans sage, echinoderms sand, chordates violet. AH may swap any of them later.
- Classic map versus modern trees. Birds stay in their own class here. Modern phylogeny nests them inside reptiles, with crocodilians as their closest living relatives. Bony fishes stay one class. Lungfishes and coelacanths sit on that page as lobe-fins, not as their own classes. Newer trees split ray-fins from lobe-fins and place land vertebrates with the lobe-fins. Whales stay in Cetacea. Newer trees nest them inside the even-toed hoofed mammals, hippos closest on land. Radiata is a teaching grade, not a clade. Comb jellies are not jellyfish. Sponges have no true tissues. Insects are often placed among crustaceans. Traditional classes for flatworms and segmented worms are kept for the course. This is not the current cladogram. Ray-fins and lobe-fins are subclasses inside the one bony-fish class. Ray-fin orders here include seahorses and puffers beside salmon, carp, perch-like fishes, catfishes, and cod. Falcons are not filed with hawks. Rabbits are not rodents. Elephants are not odd-toed hoofed mammals. Hyraxes are their own order, not elephants and not rodents. Afrotheria is named on the hyrax page and is not a branch here. Soft corals do not build the stone reef.