Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Protists do not form a natural group, or clade, but are a paraphyletic grouping of all descendants of the last eukaryotic common ancestor excluding plants, animals, and fungi. Protists were historically regarded as a separate taxonomic kingdom known as Protista or Protoctista.
Systematists today do not treat Protista as a formal taxon, but the term "protist" is still commonly used for convenience in two ways. [22] The most popular contemporary definition is a phylogenetic one, that identifies a paraphyletic group: [23] a protist is any eukaryote that is not an animal, (land) plant, or (true) fungus; this definition [24] excludes many unicellular groups, like the ...
Combined with the five-kingdom model, this created a six-kingdom model, where the kingdom Monera is replaced by the kingdoms Bacteria and Archaea. [16] This six-kingdom model is commonly used in recent US high school biology textbooks, but has received criticism for compromising the current scientific consensus. [ 13 ]
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
A protist (/ ˈ p r oʊ t ɪ s t /) is any eukaryotic organism (one with cells containing a nucleus) that is not an animal, plant, or fungus.The protists do not form a natural group, or clade, since they exclude certain eukaryotes with whom they share a common ancestor; [a] but, like algae or invertebrates, the grouping is used for convenience.
[10] [11] The taxa "animal kingdom" (or kingdom Animalia) and "plant kingdom" (or kingdom Plantae) remain in use by some modern evolutionary biologists. The initial targets of Cavalier-Smith's classification, the protozoa were classified as members of the animal kingdom, [12] and many algae were regarded as part of the plant kingdom. With ...
Kingdom Protista (or Protoctista) is included in the traditional five- or six-kingdom model, where it can be defined as containing all eukaryotes that are not plants, animals, or fungi. [ 16 ] : 120 Protista is a paraphyletic taxon, [ 47 ] which is less acceptable to present-day biologists than in the past.
In 1818, the German biologist Georg A. Goldfuss coined the word Protozoa to refer to organisms such as ciliates, [56] and this group was expanded until Ernst Haeckel made it a kingdom encompassing all single-celled eukaryotes, the Protista, in 1866. [57] [58] [59] The eukaryotes thus came to be seen as four kingdoms: Kingdom Protista; Kingdom ...