Classification is a natural human propensity—we organize our clothes, our kitchen cupboards, and our toys. This applies to the natural world, too, where animals and plants are grouped based on ...

Kevin de Queiroz, a zoologist and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History backs a movement to change the way we name species. I quoted him in a story on Carolus Linnaeus, who's ...

It is one of the triumphs of contemporary science that we have a means of naming and referring to all described organisms on Earth, as well as their fossil ancestors. It was Carl Linnaeus who realized ...

Last summer on a warm Paris morning, a few dozen members of the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature gathered at the National Museum of Natural History. The occasion was a talk by Jason ...

Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) was a Swedish botanist who devised the binomial classification system, a two-part naming system to identify, classify and name organisms from bacteria to elephant. Carl ...

The major historical trends of biodiversity studies / Edward O. Wilson -- Linnaeus : a passion for order / David Quammen -- Daniel Rolander : the invisible naturalist / James Dobreff -- Taxonomy and ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

Two books launched in June have systematized an alternative method for classifying organisms based on their evolutionary history and relationships to ancestors and descendants, regardless of their ...