2nd Contest "Steemit Weekly" -Fascinating Fauna || By @zainsteemit

Fauna Definition

Fauna is a term which refers to all of the animal life within a specified region, time period, or both. The “flora and fauna” of a certain place is a descriptor of all the life in a region, including both the plant-like organisms and the animal-like organisms. However, while this was once used as a scientific term, advances in science and our understanding of the relationships between organisms has forced science to adopt the more descriptive systems of taxonomy and cladistics to describe the relationships between organisms.

History of Fauna

Fauna was first used as a biological term by naturalist Carl Linnaeus, as a term which described the animals of a region, as opposed to the plants. Plant life was dubbed flora. Thus, the flora and fauna of a region or time describe all of the life within. Linnaeus seems to have borrowed the term from Greek and Roman mythology.

In Greek mythology, the god Pan is the goat-legged offspring of a more powerful god and a wood nymph. This leads him to become the representative god of the wild. Roman mythology adopted this persona in the gods Faunus and Fauna, which gave rise to a number of man-creatures which populated the mythology. Linnaeus adopted the word for his formal work on the animals of Sweden Fauna Suecica, in 1745. Roughly translated, this means the “wildlife of Sweden”.

Following his lead, naturalists began to use the terms flora and fauna to identify the various living organisms in a taxonomic hierarchy. Flora included everything in the kingdom Plantae, while fauna included the kingdom Animalia. The definition of fauna has expanded and changed over the years. For instance, when genotyping became a reality and it was understood that there are actually 3 domains of life, the Archaea, Bacteria, and the Eukarya.

With this change came the formal phasing out of the word fauna, scientifically. While the word flora had maintained its definition as “any organism within the kingdom Plantae”, fauna had changed drastically. Fauna, as used currently, typically describes any organisms in the domains Archaea and Bacteria, plus the kingdom Animalia. This is not a monophyletic grouping, and as such does not accurately describe anything for scientists trying to organize the forms of life in a place or time. Further, flora and fauna tend to exclude the kingdom Fungi, which was once recognized as a plant but is now recognized as its own kingdom.

Fauna of the Great Plains, 100 Million Years Ago

If we could take ourselves back in time, the fauna of the Great Plains would look much different. Although we would remain in the same place, the environment would be very different. At that time, glaciers had melted to a low, and a vast inland sea had spread across the continental United States. The Great Plains was almost entirely covered by a vast inland sea, as seen in the image below.

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