Body plan

A body plan, Bauplan (German plural Baupläne), or ground plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of animals. The vertebrate body plan is one of many: invertebrates consist of many phyla. A body plan, Bauplan (German plural Baupläne), or ground plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of animals. The vertebrate body plan is one of many: invertebrates consist of many phyla. This term, usually applied to animals, envisages a 'blueprint' encompassing aspects such as symmetry, segmentation and limb disposition. Evolutionary developmental biology seeks to explain the origins of diverse body plans. Body plans have historically been considered to have evolved in a flash in the Cambrian explosion, but a more nuanced understanding of animal evolution suggests gradual development of body plans throughout the early Palaeozoic. The history of the discovery of body plans can be seen as a movement from a worldview centred on the vertebrates, to seeing the vertebrates (or chordates) as one phylum's body plan among many. Among the pioneering zoologists, Linnaeus identified two body plans outside the vertebrates; Cuvier identified three; and Haeckel had four, as well as the Protista with eight more, for a total of twelve. For comparison, the number of phyla recognised by modern zoologists has risen to 36. In his 1735 book, Systema Naturæ, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus grouped the animals into quadrupeds, birds, 'amphibians' (including tortoises, lizards and snakes), fish, 'insects' (Insecta, in which he included arachnids, crustaceans and centipedes) and 'worms' (Vermes). Linnaeus's Vermes included effectively all other groups of animals, not only tapeworms, earthworms and leeches but molluscs, sea urchins and starfish, jellyfish, squid and cuttlefish. In his 1817 work, Le Règne Animal, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier combined evidence from comparative anatomy and palaeontology to divide the animal kingdom into four body plans. Taking the central nervous system as the main organ system which controlled all the others, such as the circulatory and digestive systems, Cuvier distinguished four body plans or embranchements: Grouping animals with these body plans resulted in four branches: vertebrates, molluscs, articulata (including insects and annelids) and zoophytes or radiata. Ernst Haeckel, in his 1866 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, asserted that all living things were monophyletic (had a single evolutionary origin), being divided into plants, protista, and animals. His protista were divided into moneres, protoplasts, flagellates, diatoms, myxomycetes, myxocystodes, rhizopods, and sponges. His animals were divided into groups with distinct body plans: he named these phyla. Haeckel's animal phyla were coelenterates, echinoderms, and (following Cuvier) articulates, molluscs, and vertebrates. Stephen J. Gould explored the idea that the different phyla could be perceived in terms of a Bauplan, illustrating their fixity. However, he later abandoned this idea in favor of punctuated equilibrium.