Why does nearly every study nowadays use the term "Metazoa" to describe the clade formed by animals rather than "Animalia". From what I can tell Animalia Linnaeus, 1758 has nearly a hundred years of priority over Metazoa Haeckel, 1874, so it is not clear why the latter term is used.
interesting. According to http://www.itis.gov/ , Animalia includes some unicellular eukaryotes (specifically, Myxozoa), while Metazoa has strictly multicellular creatures.
But myxozoans are multicellular (or, at least, some of them are), and studies tend to refer to myxozoans as metazoans as well.
As any taxon under each of these names includes insects, you can learn everything about these names from the database "Nomina Circumscribentia Insectorum".
http://www.insecta.bio.spbu.ru/z/nom/index.htm
We can speak about correctness of something, only if we have rules. The only rules applied to the names Animalia Linnaeus 1758 and Metazoa Haeckel 1874, are the rules of curcumscriptional nomenclature; according to them, multicellular animals (including spongi) should be named Metazoa, but not Animalia.
Metazoa refers specifically to multicellular animals. While by most definitions and usage animals are all multicellular, cladistically certain unicellular microbes can be found at the base of the metazoan tree.
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