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 undergoes development from an embryo stage with three tissue layers, namely the ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. The term applies to all animals except the sponges.
  • adjective Having to do with animals that develop from an embryo with three tissue 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 New Latin Metazōa, kingdom name : meta– + -zōa, pl. of -zōon, animal; see –zoon.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Metazoa +‎ -an

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Examples

  • Consider two classes of transcription factors that are known to play crucial roles in metazoan development: the T-box proteins and the SOX proteins.

    2008 April - Telic Thoughts 2008

  • 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

  • These proteins play essential roles in metazoan development and are considered part of the developmental toolkit as outlined by biologist Sean Carroll.

    2007 September - Telic Thoughts 2007

  • 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. "

    Circus of the Spineless 2005

  • They are just the simplest, barest kind of metazoan we can find now.

    Mysterious Trichoplax - The Panda's Thumb 2005

  • They are just the simplest, barest kind of metazoan we can find now.

    The Panda's Thumb: November 2005 Archives 2005

  • I think this is very subjective; I was quite happy with Merriam Webster's definition of "metazoan," for example.

    languagehat.com: COELOM. 2005

  • A data dump now about problems with metazoan (or chordate or mammalian) phylogeny would be getting ahead of the discussion.

    A Disclaimer for Behe? 2009

  • A data dump now about problems with metazoan (or chordate or mammalian) phylogeny would be getting ahead of the discussion.

    A Disclaimer for Behe? 2009

  • 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.

    Ancient Predator Revealed! 2009

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