We understand that some words in our field can be long and confusing at times, even for us. Therefore, we’ve assembled this helpful alphabetised list of definitions to make reading our articles a little easier.
Anoxia: without oxygen
Biodiversity: the variety of biological organisms in a particular environment
Biogeography: the distribution of plants and animals geographically and through geological time and space
Clade: a group of all of the evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor
Contemporary: (1) modern (2) living at the same time in the same place
Endothermic: an animal’s ability to maintain a constant body temperature independent of their surrounding environment
Extant: alive in the modern world/still existing today
Faunivorous: diet of eating other animals
Genus: a taxonomic rank above species (plural: genera)
Infraorder: a collection of animals within an order, larger than a suborder
Invertebrate: animals without a spine
Iterative evolution: the repeated evolution of similar structures from the same ancestor but at different times in that lineage
Lithology: the physical characteristics of rocks
Monophyletic: a taxon consisting of a most recent common ancestor and all its descendants
Morphology: how an animal looks
Niche: a specific role taken by an organism in a community
Order: a taxonomic rank above family and below class
Palaeocontinent: continents/continental arrangements that existed in the geological past
Palaeoenvironment: the environment that used to be present in an area
Paraphyletic: a taxon consisting of a most recent common ancestor and some of its descendants
Pelagic: living in the open ocean, far from the shore
Phylogeny: the study of the evolutionary development of organisms or their features
Phylum: a taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class (plural: phyla)
Polyphyletic: a taxon consisting of organisms that do not share a recent common ancestor
Sauropterygia: an extinct clade of secondarily aquatic reptiles that evolved from terrestrial ancestors soon after the end-Permian mass extinction
Secondarily aquatic tetrapods: aquatic animals which developed from terrestrial ancestors, which originally descended from primarily aquatic tetrapod ancestors
Stratum: a layer of rock (plural: strata)
Subfamily: a collection of animals within a family, smaller than a family
Suborder: a collection of animals within an order, smaller than an infraorder
Species: the principal taxonomic unit for naming organisms
Taxon: any rank of taxonomic group (plural: taxa)
Taxonomy: a system of classification of organisms
Tetrapods: four-limbed vertebrate animals
Thermoregulation: a process that enables the regulation of internal body temperature
Uniformitarianism: the theory that changes of Earth’s crust during geological history have been caused by continuous and uniform processes
Vertebrate: animals with a spine