Join the Amoeba Sisters in exploring some general animal characteristics, major vocabulary used in classifying animals (such as symmetry, protostome vs deuterostome, cephalization, and coelom), and take a general tour of 9 major animal...

If you trace your way back along the tree of life, eventually you'd come face-to-face with the very first animal. But what exactly would that animal have looked like?

Salps are more than just strange balls of goo drifting through the sea—in fact, they’re more closely related to us than they are to jellyfish, and play a huge role in marine ecosystems and the global carbon cycle as the “vacuum cleaners...

While humans age and die (which is kind of a bummer), it looks like hydras will stay young and fertile forever. Why is this? And what can we learn from these tentacular microscopic organisms?

Hank introduces us to the "simplest" of the animals, complexity-wise: beginning with sponges (whose very inclusion in the list as "animals" has been called into question because they are so simple) and finishing with the most complex...

As we now know, there are five major classes within phylum Cnidaria, and we will go through them one at a time. First up is class Hydrozoa. This contains a variety of small predatory polyps, such as hydras. These are fascinating...

Of the five major classes of phylum Cnidaria, we have just one more to cover, and that's Anthozoa. These are "flower animals", or polyps that lack a medusa stage, such as anemones, corals, sea pens, and more. Let's take a look at these...

Next up for animal phyla is Cnidaria! This phylum contains jellyfish, sea anemones, corals, and all kinds of other organisms. This one is pretty meaty so it will take several tutorials. Let's start by getting through some information...

We are covering the classes within phylum Cnidaria, and with Hydrozoa finished, we can move on to Scyphozoa and Staurozoa. The Scyphozoans are the "true jellyfish", possibly the most widely recognized Cnidarians, while the Staurozoans...

With three classes of phylum Cnidaria covered let's move on to the fourth, Cubozoa. This contains the box jellyfish, which differ in important ways from the true jellyfish of Scyphozoa. The most interesting thing about them structurally...

Upon viewing the Simple Animals video series, students will be able to do the following: Differentiate between and provide examples of vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Describe the basic body parts of a sponge (porifera). Explain the...

We just learned about class Anthozoa, which is the class of Cnidaria that contains all the corals. But there is much more to talk about with corals, as the massive coral reefs that they form act as entire ecosystems unto themselves....

We've covered the five major classes of phylum Cnidaria, but there are actually two more minor ones that deserve a brief investigation. These are Myxozoa, and Polypodiozoa. These classes contain tiny parasitic species that have...

Soon we are going to dive into a study of all the different kinds of animals, but first we need some kind of road map. What are all the major divisions of Kingdom Animalia? Below kingdom is phylum, so how many animal phyla are there, and...

This video provides a brief overview of two phyla of animals: Porifera (sponges) and Cnidaria (corals, sea anemones, hydra, and jellyfish). This video is part of the 11-part series, Classifying Animals.