SOKOINE UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE

College of Forestry, Wildlife and Tourism

BTM 111: Introduction to Animal Kingdom

2017/2018
Course Instructor: Lazaro J. Mangewa (MSc)
 Life on Earth and Tourism
• Life probably arose on the earth between 2
and 3 billion years ago

• Geologists estimate that the earth could be

4.6 mil years old

• Life beginnings may have occurred deep in

the ocean

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• In underwater hot springs called

hydrothermal vents where is a group of

bacteria called archaebacteria that tolerate

temperature up to 120 degree centigrade and

seem to have undergone less evolutionary

changes

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cont…
• Another origin of the earth’s first organic
molecules is the outer space

• Followed by a second step which is

hooking together of molecules into
polymers of living organisms

• The last step is subject to many

speculations

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• Despite of the speculations due to
lack of adequate knowledge
concerning the relationships btn
major groups of organisms, human
has traditionally attempted to assign
all living things to one or another of a few

large categories called KINGDOMS

• However, evolutionary change has
been going on ever since with key
outcomes:

i) an increasing organism complexity;

manifested in many lineages; and

ii) an increasing diversity; expressed in

the enormous variety of organisms now
inhabiting this planet
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• Life may already have been well-established
only a few hundred million years after the
formation of the Earth.

• 3.5 billion years of evolution brought about

biodiversity

• Until approximately 600 million years ago, all life

consisted of bacteria, protozoans and similar single-
celled organisms.

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• The history of biodiversity during the last 540
million years starts with rapid growth during
the Cambrian explosion/Cambrian period:
– a relatively short period during which nearly
every phylum of multicellular organisms first
appeared, indicated in the fossil records
– The event accompanied with diversification of other
organisms

• Over the next 400 million years or so,

invertebrate diversity showed little overall
trend, and vertebrate diversity shows an
overall exponential trend.
trend 9
• This dramatic rise in diversity was
marked by periodic massive losses of
diversity classified as mass
extinction events:
events
– Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction;
– Late Devonian mass extinction;
– Permian mass extinction;
– Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction; and
– Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction.
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• A significant loss occurred when
rainforests collapsed in the
carboniferous period

• Vertebrates took 30 million years to

recover from this event

• The fossil record suggests that the

last few million years featured the
greatest biodiversity in history 11
QUIZ-1:

a) Identify and give a common

Name of the following animals

b) Give one feature to support the answer

in (a)

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A
A

B 13
C

D
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 TAKE HOME ASSIGNMENT-1

WHAT ARE THE KEY RELATIONSHIPS

BETWEEN ANIMALS, TOURISTS AND
TOURISM INDUSTRY

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