The Variety of Animal Forms

In this section, we will consider only a few biochemical and other aspects of multicellular animals or Metazoa. The sudden appearance of a large number of Metazoans about 0.5 x 109 years ago may have been an outcome of the appearance of split genes (see Section B, 1). As a result of gene duplication the coding pieces of split genes, the exons, could be moved to new locations in a chromosome where they could have become fused with other pieces of DNA to form entirely new genes.