Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of defining and naming groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics. The classification of organisms has various hierarchical categories. Categories gradually shift from being very broad and including many different organisms to very specific and identifying single species.

There are currently 8 hierarchical categories: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. This Taxonomic structure often called the Phylogenetic Tree or the Tree of Life, and it illustrates the evolutionary relationships between all living species. There are about 2 million known species on Earth, but new species keep getting discovered all the time, and the more organisms we have to keep track of the more complex the Phylogenetic Tree becomes. So the system isn’t perfect but its good enough that we have been using it for around 250 years.

CARL LINNAEUS; was a Swedish naturalist from the 18th century and is considered the father of modern taxonomy, and he was the first to separate organisms into hierarchical categories. And he was the one to develop the ‘binomial nomenclature’; a unique two-part name for every species the first part derived from the genus to which it belongs and the second the species itself.

In his lifetime Linnaeus cataloged roughly 7700 plants and 4400 animals. He published his classifications in a catalog called SYSTEMA NATURAE.

Although taxonomy has come a long way since Linnaeus, we still use some of the conventions that he invented. For instance, we use his binomial nomenclature, and we still arrange things in Taxa (a group of organisms ), and we still use the same taxa as Linnaeus: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. however because there was a lot of life that Linnaeus had no idea about we had to stick a new taxon above Linnaeus’ Kingdom, its called Domain, and it is as broad as it can get. There are three Domains “ For Now “ and they are BACTERIA, ARCHAEA, and EUKARYA. 

Hopefully, we’ll get to talk about each domain in details in a future article.