Cambridge O Level Biology · Syllabus 5090 · Classification
Arthropod
What is Arthropod?
An arthropod is an animal with a segmented body, jointed limbs and an exoskeleton. The four arthropod groups required by Cambridge O Level Biology are insects, arachnids, crustaceans and myriapods, and they are separated by the number of pairs of legs, the number of body regions and the number of pairs of antennae.
This definition is part of the Classification chapter in Cambridge O Level Biology.
Arthropod in context
Classification is the placing of living organisms into groups on the basis of the features they share, so that organisms with many features in common sit in the same group. Cambridge O Level Biology (5090) Chapter 2 covers four things: the definition of a species and the binomial naming system, dichotomous keys, the five kingdoms (animal, plant, fungus, prokaryote and protoctist), and the observable features that separate the vertebrate groups, the arthropod groups, ferns from flowering plants and monocotyledons from dicotyledons. Viruses sit apart from all five kingdoms because they have no cellular structure.