![]() Organism shape: spheres, flatten ed, cylinders.1 Add to the Star Wars bar scene? This organism changes composition, form and size throughout its life with the most noticeable form being a cylinder about 10 cm in height topped with a sphere. Moreover, they are also often dynamic, changing during the existence of an organism. Composition, size, and shape are interrelated and significant to other aspects of an organism’s biology. This makes attempting to characterize the form of larger taxonomic entities (class, order, phylum) challenging, if not impossible. Consequently, although form, size and composition are extremely important to an organism’s biology, they are remarkably poor indicators of phylogeny. These characteristics have been shaped by evolution, and evidence of convergence (unrelated groups converging on a common form) and divergence (related groups showing a variety of forms) abound. Organisms vary from each other in multiple ways but in this chapter, I will focus on three aspects, two of which, size and form, are very straightforward, but the third aspect, composition, is less familiar. Without going outside this planet one can come up with a much more diverse set of organisms, as I hope this chapter demonstrates. ![]() It was a remarkably unimaginative effort: all of the life-forms illustrated had a striking resemblance to humans, all about the same size and with the same basic components (e.g., head, legs, arms). In the famous Star Wars bar scene, an attempt was made to illustrate diverse organisms.
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