Fauna is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora.
Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna". It also can refer to a given subset of the fauna of a given region, as in: "... the Amazon basin has a rich ant fauna...".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
The name comes from Fauna, a Roman fertility and earth goddess, the Roman god Faunus, and the related forest spirits called Fauns. All three words are cognates of the name of the Greek god Pan, and panis is the Greek equivalent of fauna. Fauna is also the word for a book that catalogues the animals in such a manner. The term was first used by Linnaeus in the title of his 1747 work Fauna Suecica.
Fauna is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora.
Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna". It also can refer to a given subset of the fauna of a given region, as in: "... the Amazon basin has a rich ant fauna...".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
The name comes from Fauna, a Roman fertility and earth goddess, the Roman god Faunus, and the related forest spirits called Fauns. All three words are cognates of the name of the Greek god Pan, and panis is the Greek equivalent of fauna. Fauna is also the word for a book that catalogues the animals in such a manner. The term was first used by Linnaeus in the title of his 1747 work Fauna Suecica.