Ask A Scientist Zoology Archive

name         Sinchana
status       student
age          5

Question -   Why animals have tails?
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Hi Sinchana!
First of all lets talk a little bit. We, men, women,
children have our bodies made up of meat and bones.
The bones are hard and are somehow covered by meat.
The bones all together form our skeleton and help
us in many ways: to move, to walk, to sit, to stand
and so on. If you rub your hand all the way from 
the neck of a person down to the botton you can
feel a kind of straight collection of bones, they form
what is called spinal column. In men and women the
spinal column stops there, at the botton. In other
animals it goes further and is called tail.


Many animals have tails with different and
very important uses.
For example,  in monkeys they help them to move
from tree to tree and to fix in a tree branch.
In other animals, like cats and dogs, the tails
serve to communicate and show emotions, see how 
your dog tail moves when it is happy...And when a cat
is angry, its tail waves back and forth very fast...
Also in cats and other animals the tails serve for
keeping their equilibrium. Another use mostly in big
animals is to help them to get rid of insects, waving
them away.
But the more important tail use in animals
is to help their body to be kept warm.
Animals that live in waters also have tails and they 
permit them to move very fast to the direction 
they choose.


See my dear in nature everything has a reason and a
way to be.
And it was very nice trying to answer to you. If
you want to know anything else come back to us!

Mabel
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Evolution and adaptation have given animals many different body shapes and
styles. Many mammals use tails for display; some, like squirrels, use them
to help keep their balance; bats and birds use their tails to fly - the uses
are wonderfully different. We really can't answer why tails evolved in the
first place, but once they began to develop animals have adapted to use them
in marvelous ways.

J. Elliott
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