Thread: confuzed
View Single Post
  #3   Report Post  
Old 27-09-2005, 05:06 AM
mel turner
 
Posts: n/a
Default

"beechybabe" wrote in message
oups.com...
As some protoza contain chloroplasts, does this not make them more
animal than plant?


You presumably mean, the presence of chloroplasts makes them more
_plantlike_.

They are indeed plantlike in that one regard. Some are also plantlike
in having rigid cell walls. However, it is now understood that
chloroplasts and "plantlike" eukaryotic organisms have had several
independent origins. Many of these are not at all closely related to
the green land plants. The different groups of multicellular "algae"
also have had independent origins as chloroplast-bearing plantlike
organisms. You might like to learn more about the evidence for the
endosymbiotic origins of chloroplasts in these groups.

For that matter the "protozoa" or "protists" are not a single
evolutionary lineage, they're terms including many unrelated
groups of eukaryotic organisms that are not animals, true fungi or
green plants.

Anyway, what's the question here?
It's pretty pointless to worry about whether protozoa are more
plantlike or animal-like, since they're actually neither. None of
them are "true" animals or true green plants; those are simply two
particular major evolutionary lineages of multicellular organisms.

http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Eukaryo...=Life_on_Earth
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/eukaryotasy.html
etc

will have more info and further links about plants, animals and
"protozoa".

cheers