Hickman: Animal Diversity, 8th edition

A major new feature of edition 8 is a list of learning objectives at the start of each chapter. These objectives help students to place a chapter’s detailed information into the context of its major organizing principles.

Many revisions to the eighth edition are primarily to improve pedagogy. The content of Animal Diversity is condensed from the more comprehensive textbook, Integrated Principles of Zoology. The recently completed seventeenth edition of Integrated Principles of Zoology was guided by an electronic tabulation of students’ responses to questions linked to the book. Authors received a heat map showing for each paragraph the percentage of correct student responses for the material covered. We focused our revisions on improving explanations wherever the heat map showed that correct responses were below 50%. With this detailed and insightful guidance, we made our text more accessible and memorable to its readers. We import these pedagogical improvements from the seventeenth edition of Integrated Principles of Zoology to the corresponding sections of the eighth edition of Animal Diversity.

Most of these revisions comprise more detailed explanations, including new illustrative examples. For example, to reinforce the statement in Chapter 1 that Charles Lyell’s geological studies convinced him that earth’s age must be measured in hundreds of millions of years, we add the supporting information “For example, as skeletal remains of corals, foraminiferans, and mollusks accumulate on the sea floor, they form sediments of calcium carbonate that eventually become compressed into limestone. Measured rates of sedimentation are much too slow to have produced earth’s sedimentary rock formations in a shorter period of time.” Potassium-argon dating of rock strata was another point that required some further explanation to be fully accessible, so we added to our explanation in Chapter 1 “Argon is a noble gas that evaporates from liquid media. It accumulates in the crystal structure of rock only after the rock has solidified and the nuclear decay of potassium-40 produces a trapped atom of argon.”

1. Science of Zoology and Evolution of Animal Diversity
2. Animal Ecology
3. Animal Architecture
4. Taxonomy and Phylogeny of Animals
5. Unicellular Eukaryotes
6. Sponges: Phylum Porifera
7. Cnidarians and Ctenophores
8. Acoelomorpha, Platyzoa, and Mesozoa: Flatworms, Gastrotrichs, Gnathiferans, and Mesozoans
9. Polyzoa and Kryptrochozoa: Cycliophora, Entoprocta, Ectoprocta, Brachiopoda, Phoronida, and Nemertea
10. Molluscs

11. Annelids and Allied Taxa
12. Smaller Ecdysozoans
13. Arthropods
14. Chaetognaths, Echinoderms, and Hemichordates
15. Vertebrate Beginnings: The Chordates
16. Fishes
17. The Early Tetrapods and Modern Amphibians
18. Amniote Origins and Nonavian Reptiles
19. Birds
20. Mammals

Sample Chapter

Learn more about the new edition by visiting this virtual brochure.

Connect

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