ANIMALS DEFINITION AND CLASSIFICATION

ANIMAL

An animal is defined as any living thing that cannot make its own food. A plant can use sun, air and water to make food. It can also draw nourishment from the soil through its roots.
An animal cannot do this. It usually has to search for food, so most animals can move around. Animals that cannot move, such as sponges and corals, live in the sea, where they simply catch their food as it drifts past. Insects, fishes, amphibians  reptiles, birds and mammals are all animals which move around.
Now let us study about the mammals.

A cow is a mammal. It gives birth to babycows and they in turn feed on the milk their mother provides.

MAMMAL

A mammal is a warm-blooded, vertebrate animal with hair on its body. All female mammals have milk to feed their young ones.
Mammals are the most important animals in the world. They are stronger and cleverer than other kinds of animal.
The most important mammal of all is the human being.
The several thousand species of mammals living today are grouped into 18 orders. These orders are divided into more than 100 families.

EDENTATA
This order includes 3 families of mammals, all of which have gone along the evolutionary track of tooth reduction or loss in connection with their specialized diet of insects such as ants and termites. The families are the anteaters, the sloths and the armadillos.
The name of the order means, appropriately, "the toothless ones".

A man walking around.

An Armadillo caught in a bucket

MONOTREME

A mammal that lays eggs, but also has milk for its young. There are only two kinds of monotreme , the duck-billed platypus and the echidna, and both are found in Australia.

This is and ordinary duck.
To see the picture of a duck-billed platypus........

MARSUPIAL

A marsupial is a mammal whose babies are born very tiny and not fully developed. Most marsupials, like the kangaroo and the koala, have a pouch in which the helpless babies live and grow.
A very few species, such as some American opossums, have no pouch and the babies cling to the mother's body. Marsupials are found only in Australia and America.

The Kola

INSECTIVORE

Insectivore is an animal that eats insects.
There is an order of mammals called insectivores. They all have small eyes and ears, and whiskery snouts. Hedgehogs, moles and shrews belong to this order.

A Hedgehog

PRIMATE

Primates are the order of mammals to which lemurs, bush babies, monkeys, apes and humans belong.

A Cartoon Monkey

APE

Apes are mammals belonging to the order known as primates.
Apes are more like human beings than any other animal.
They have the same number of teeth, similar hands and can walk upright on their hind legs. They are also intelligent, although an ape's brain is less than half the size of a human brain. There are four species of ape,- the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan  and the gibbon.

A Gorilla

RODENT

Rodents are furry mammals with large, curved front teeth.
These teeth never stop growing, so rodents have to gnaw all the time to keep them short. Rodents are found in all parts of the world except the Antarctic.

A cartoon Squirell

CARNIVORE

An order of mammals that eats other animals are called carnivores.
It includes dogs, cats, bears, weasels, badgers, raccoons, seals and hyenas.

A cartoon LION

HERBIVORE

An animal that eats only plants is in the herbivore group.
Cattle, sheep, deer and horses and herbivores.