Penguin. Make your own dichotomous key of the following organisms. Go from the broadest separation to the most specific.

Question

Make your own dichotomous key of the following organisms. Go from the broadest separation to the most specific.

Penguin

Answer 1

So Kat H.,

You are asked to create a dichotomous key. What is that? When you ask questions (in succession), each of which have a "Yes / No" answer or "True / False", in order to classify your animal. So you are making your own version of breaking down the animal Kingdom by levels of specificity. Not necessarily exactly the way Linnaeus did it, but along the same lines.

So, when you consider all animals (you are heading towards penguins, remember), you might start with the question: Does it have a backbone?

Now, why start with that? Because you want the most basic ideas about animal construction to come first, and having/not-having a backbone is more basic than, for example, "does it have eyes?" How can I say that, eyes seem pretty important -- until you know that eyes have evolved perhaps 40 times INDEPENDENTLY during all of evolution! Whereas, the essential part of animal organization, a backbone (or actually, a notochord, first) evolved only ONCE. because it was such a useful thing!

Then, perhaps, does it have feathers?

And so on.

You could get ideas by looking up penguin on Wikiedia, and following the classification you find there, down the Linnaean levels. Look up terms you find successively (Animalia, Chordata, Aves ...) to find out what distinguishes them from other Kingdoms, Phyla, Classes, ...) Then put those differences into a simple "yes/No" question format. It's a piece of squid! (looking at it from the point of view of a penguin, you understand!)

-- Cheers, --Mr. d.