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Article: Morphology
- Article from:
- Animal Sciences
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Morphology
Morphology, broadly defined as the study of animal form, is a field that helps us understand animal diversity and animal history. For centuries, scientists have been interested in how animals are put together and how the parts work together to make functioning organisms that can run, fly, swim, eat, and survive. Early scientific efforts focused on descriptive methods in which scientists dissected specimens and described the musculoskeletal and other body systems with words and detailed drawings.
As new techniques were developed, scientists began to specialize along the lines of various subdisciplines, including
functional morphology
and ecological morphology. Morphologists ...