Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of numerous heterotrophic eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Metazoa, characteristically having a multicellular body with cells differentiated into tissues; an animal.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Of or pertaining to the Metazoa.
- noun A member of the Metazoa; a metazoön.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) One of the Metazoa.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun zoology Any
animal that undergoesdevelopment from anembryo stage with threetissue layers, namely theectoderm ,mesoderm , andendoderm . The term applies to all animals except thesponges . - adjective Having to do with
animals that develop from anembryo with threetissue layers.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun any animal of the subkingdom Metazoa; all animals except protozoans and sponges
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Consider two classes of transcription factors that are known to play crucial roles in metazoan development: the T-box proteins and the SOX proteins.
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Consider two classes of transcription factors that are known to play crucial roles in metazoan development: the T-box proteins and the SOX proteins.
As Expected 2008
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These proteins play essential roles in metazoan development and are considered part of the developmental toolkit as outlined by biologist Sean Carroll.
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He briefly discusses a recent paper where "The authors concluded that gene loss had been a substantial factor in evolution, and that" the ancestral metazoan is likely to have been much more complex than was previously imagined. "
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They are just the simplest, barest kind of metazoan we can find now.
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They are just the simplest, barest kind of metazoan we can find now.
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I think this is very subjective; I was quite happy with Merriam Webster's definition of "metazoan," for example.
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A data dump now about problems with metazoan (or chordate or mammalian) phylogeny would be getting ahead of the discussion.
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A data dump now about problems with metazoan (or chordate or mammalian) phylogeny would be getting ahead of the discussion.
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If I were a FLID supporter, I would propose that the homeobox regulatory mechanism for body regions was a "front-loaded design element" that, once it was in place, could be modified extensively via standard evolutionary mechanisms to produce the various metameric metazoan bauplans.
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