Joan Young, age 12, of E1 Cajon., Calif., for her questions

What does the word zoology mean?

The second part of this word comes from an older Greek word meaning discourse, study or science. Biology, the study of living things, and bacteriology, the study of bacteria, use the same root. The first part of the word zoology comes from a Greek word meaning animal. Biology is the study of all living things, plants and animals. Zoology is the study of the animal kingdom.

No zoologist could be an expert in all aspects of zoology there are so many animals past and present. So the huge science is broken down into a great many branch studies. Bacteriology is a branch of zoology. Ichthyology, the study of fishes, is a branch of zoology and so is ornithology, the study of birds. A fairly new branch, growing in importance, is ecology, the study of animals in relation to their environment.