All about Vertebrates

2. What can you feel?
What Can You Feel?
Reach your hand behind your back.
Place your hand on the middle of your back and run your fingers up and down.
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about
It!
The lumps you can feel going up the
middle of your back are part of your
backbone. The technical word for the
backbone is your spine.
The spine is a series of bones called
vertebrae. The spine helps us stay upright
and helps us twist and move. It also
protects special things called nerves which
carry messages to and from the brain.
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3. What is a Vertebrate?
A vertebrate is an animal that has a spine. As we have just felt our own spines,
that means humans are vertebrates.
Animals that don’t have spines are called invertebrates.
Can you think of some animals that might be invertebrates?
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about
It!
Click to see some animals that are invertebrates.
slug snail
worm

4. Vertebrates
Cats, rabbits and dogs are all vertebrates, which means they have spines.
Click on the animal to perform an x-ray and reveal its skeleton.
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Can you see the animals’ spines?
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about
It!

5. You could sort people into groups of:
• girls and boys;
• children with dark hair and light hair;
• children who wear glasses and don’t
wear glasses.
Look around your class.
How could you sort people
into different groups?
Classifying Vertebrates
Classifying means sorting into groups.
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about
It!
!

6. Here are some questions you could ask:
• Does the animal have feathers?
• Can the animal fly?
• Does the animal have fur?
• Does the animal have four legs?
What questions could you
ask about the different
features of animals?
Classifying Vertebrates
To classify animals, we ask questions about features they have.
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about
It!
!

7. Classifying Vertebrates
There are lots of way of classifying
vertebrates. It helps us learn more
about an animal. You classify by using
something called a key.
You ask questions about the animal
and work your way down the key. Look
at this way of classifying an animal.
Does it have feathers?
no yes
Does it have fur?
no
Is it a wild animal?
yes
lion
yes
no

8. Yes and No Questions
You may have noticed that the questions in a key all have to have either the
answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So the question ‘How many legs does the animal have?’
wouldn’t work, but ‘Does the animal have four legs?’ would.
Look at these questions. How could they be changed into yes or no questions?
What colour is the animal? Is the animal black?
How many wings does
the animal have?
Does the animal have two wings?
Where does the animal live? Does the animal live in the sea?