Think like a zoologist, see like a field scientist

If you're here, I suspect you already feel it — that pull toward the animal world that never quite went away. Maybe you've read every field guide on your shelf, spent hours watching wildlife footage, or found yourself down a rabbit hole about cephalopod cognition at midnight. That curiosity is the most important thing you're bringing to this school. My job is to give it a rigorous structure to grow into.

Here's what I've found: most people who love animals have never been handed the actual scientific vocabulary and conceptual frameworks that transform observation into understanding. They can tell you a cheetah is fast. They can't yet explain how its open circulatory system, specialized muscle fiber composition, and predator–prey co-evolutionary arms race produced that speed — or how we know what we know from both living anatomy and fossil evidence. That gap, between enthusiasm and systematic knowledge, is exactly what Wild Animal Science is designed to close.

This school is built the way a good university zoology sequence is built — from the ground up, with each layer of knowledge supporting the next. We start with the animal body at the cellular and tissue level, because you can't make sense of classification or physiology without it. We move through taxonomy and the full sweep of phyla with real tools — you'll learn to key out an unknown species, not just memorize a list. We go deep into evolution and phylogenetics, including how molecular data has genuinely rewritten parts of the tree of life. We compare physiological systems across wildly different animals and ask why natural selection produced so many solutions to the same problems. We study behavior through the lens of ethology, from Tinbergen's foundational framework to the latest thinking on animal cognition and deception. And we end in the field, designing surveys and interpreting behavioral data the way working ecologists do.

I won't pretend this is a passive experience. The material is rich, the terminology is precise, and I'll ask you to think — not just absorb. But I promise you this: every piece of scientific machinery we build together will immediately illuminate something real. You'll finish a module on convergent evolution and never look at a dolphin and a shark the same way again. You'll learn Tinbergen's Four Questions and suddenly have a framework for every animal behavior you'll ever observe for the rest of your life.

You don't need a lab coat or a degree to begin. You need the curiosity you already have, and the willingness to do real intellectual work. If that describes you, I'd be genuinely honored to be your guide through the animal kingdom — from the molecular to the ecological, from the ancient fossil record to a field notebook you fill in yourself.