The Diversity of Life (Part 1)

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The Diversity of Life (Part 1)
Plants are part of the diversity of life
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Organisms

• An organism is a living thing
• There is a lot of diversity among organisms
• Diversity means different types

There are many types of living things
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How Old is Life?

• Earth is about 4.56 billion years old
• The earliest known organism lived about 3.5
  billion years ago, but life may have existed
  before that
• A billion is a thousand times a thousand times a
  thousand or 1,000,000,000

Earth looked very different billions of years ago
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Earth Timeline
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What is an Ancestor?

• All organisms have the same ancestors if you look
  back in time far enough
• An ancestor is a parent, or a parent of a parent,
  or a parent of a parent of a parent, and so on,
  back in time
• This means that you are related to all living
  things, including plants and bacteria

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Taxa and Characteristics

• Scientists put organisms into different groups
  called taxa (singular taxon) based on their
  shared characteristics
• A characteristic is something that can be
  observed about an organism (like a property of a
  substance)
• For example, characteristics of humans include
  having big brains and walking on two legs

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Classification

• Classification is the process of putting
  organisms into groups

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How are organisms classified?

• Organisms are classified (put into groups) by
  having
• Similar body structures
• Similar development
• Similar in DNA
• Development is how an organism grows and changes
  from the time its first made until it is an
  adult

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Similarities in Development
Egg
Adult
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Naming things

• Nomenclature is naming things
• Scientists all use the same name for an organism,
  no matter what language they speak
• Why do you think they do this instead of using
  different names?

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Using Different Languages for Names
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Using the Same Nomenclature