Explore Your Inner Animals

This interactive module explores different anatomical features of the human body and what they reveal about the evolutionary history of humans.

A close look at the human body reveals structures that evolved from common ancestors shared with other animals, including long-extinct species. For example, the pattern of the bones in human arms can be traced back to fossilized fish that lived when life first made the transition from water to land. Other structures that were present in early human ancestors have only vestigial forms in modern humans. The tailbone, for example, is all that’s left of an ancestral tail. This Click & Learn allows students to explore these and many other features — and compare them to those of fossilized organisms, such as Ardipithecus (Ardi), Gorgonopsid, Notharctus, Proconsul, Tiktaalik — to discover the evolutionary history of our bodies.

The accompanying worksheet guides students’ exploration.

The “Resource Google Folder” link directs to a Google Drive folder of resource documents in the Google Docs format. Not all downloadable documents for the resource may be available in this format. The Google Drive folder is set as “View Only”; to save a copy of a document in this folder to your Google Drive, open that document, then select File → “Make a copy.” These documents can be copied, modified, and distributed online following the Terms of Use listed in the “Details” section below, including crediting BioInteractive.