General

• Information for Social Change – An activist organisation and journal which explores issues of censorship, the control of information and implications for education and society.
• Archipelago MUD instructions – for compiling under Cygwin but possibly other UNIX variants

Natural History

• The rise of animals – covers early bilateral animals including the “Ediacaran Biota” and “Burgess Shale”
• Ediacaran biota: the dawn of animal life in the shadow of giant ptotists
• Opabinia – One of the most interesting animals of the Burgess Shale
• GEOL 204 Dinosaurs, Early Humans, Ancestors & Evolution
• Dendrogramma enigmatica – a recently discovered species possibly representing “an early branch on the tree of life, with similarities to the 600 million-year-old extinct Ediacara fauna”.
• The tunicate life cycle and chordate origins – the tadpole-like larvae of sessile adult stage tunicate animals points to the origin of the chordates via neoteny (retention of juvenile form) which gave rise to motile (free swimming) early chordates and fish. The origin of motile larvae can be further traced back some 600 million years to cnidaria like animals (e.g. jellyfish) and their precursors such as sponges. Also see this this article on cnidaria and this video of coral larvae for comparison. For a slightly different hypothesis on the hybrid origins of multi-phased animals with larvae see this article.
• The planula hypothesis – the idea that a planula like (laval stage of cnidarian) gave rise to metazoan animals.
• Unfolding a chordate developmental program, one cell at a time
• ..also see the Wikipedia article on the trochophore larvae of the trochozoan clade (molluscs, annelids), which resembles the
• Larvae of the echinoderms – which is bilateral and possesses many featues of chordates may be a sister phylum of the chordates but may also comprise the origins of the bilateria via pedomprhic retention of the larval stage.
• Larvacea – an interesting group of chordate tunicates which via neoteny appears to retain the larval stage only (the polyp becomes a tadpole-like animal but does not become sessile) and may represent a transitional stage in the evolution of chordates.
• Jellyfish (Box jellyfish) eyes – simple ocelli (pit eyes) to detect light and dark and complex lens-based, image-forming eyes are found in jellyfish. Ocelli are found in even older animals such as the jelly-fish like ctenophore, also see this paper (the ctenophora can be dated back at least 500 million years).
• The parietal eye – this is an ocelli-like simple eye found on top of the head of many animals, from the laval stage of tunicates to amphibians and some reptiles (e.g. a bullfrog, a snake).
• Palaeos – The Palaeos website is organised along two themes; time, being the geological timescale, deep time, which spans not the mere centuries or millennia of world history, but millions or even billions of years, and mapping out the evolution, specifically the evolution of life on Earth.
• Origins of neurogenesis, a cnidarian view
• Recent Insights into Cnidarian Phylogeny
• Marine larval ecology on Wikipedia (Theories on the evolution of a biphasic life history)
• The Evolutionary Origins of Light Sensitivity
• Frontiers in Phylogenetics – Genome-scale Phylogenetics by Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History
• The urbilaterian –  the hypothetical last common ancestor of the bilaterian clade, i.e., all animals having a bilateral symmetry.
• The urmetazoan – the hypothetical last common ancestor of all animals.
• The choanoflagellates – a group of free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals (also appear to be present in the sponges and closely resemble spermatozoa).
• Vetulicolia – are crown-group chordates and probably the sister group of modern tunicates.
• Deuterostomes of Wikipedia – a subtaxon of the bilateria branch of the subkingdom Eumetazoa, within Animalia.
• Cynodonts on Wikipedia – interesting group of early stem mammals.
• Tetrapdomorpha on Wikipedia – Advanced forms transitional between fish and the early labyrinthodonts, such as Tiktaalik, have been referred to as “fishapods”… being half-fish, half-tetrapods, in appearance and limb morphology.
• Life arranged by kingdoms
• Cladistics on Wikipedia
• Opisthokont – an unranked group designation broadly grouping and indicating the relationship of animals and fungi
• Mitochondira– the “power house” of the eukaryote (animals, plants etc,) cell.
• Protists on Wikipedia
• Ambiogenesis – the hypothetical origin of life from chemistry, also see Wikipedia pages on historical chemical experiments to produce an artificial protocell, the Jeewanu cell and the chemoton cell.
• The evolutionary-developmental origins of multicellularity
• Recapitulation_theory – expressed in Ernst Haeckel’s phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”— is an hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors.