Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Metazoan
/ˌmɛtəˈzoʊən/noun
Any animal built from more than one cell, which is to say every true animal.
The Greek roots
μετά
metá
after, beyond
ζῷον
zôion
living thing, animal
Literally: “after-animal”
The story of the word
Ernst Haeckel coined Metazoa in the 1870s to stand against Protozoa, with after meaning both later in time and higher on his ladder of descent. Everything from a sponge to a blue whale sits inside the term. The interesting edge case is the choanoflagellate, a single-celled organism with a collar of filaments that looks strikingly like the feeding cells of a sponge, and which genetics places as the animals' closest living relative.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
protozoanzoologyzodiacmetamorphosismethod
In a sentence
The fossil bed holds the earliest metazoans anyone has agreed on.