Taxonomy
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Photo: Wikipedia
In many of my blog posts about animals and plants, I often mention at least the species’ “Latin name”. Occasionally, I also mention a Family or Order that that animal is in in order to share what other organisms are related to them. These ways of describing living things and organizing them into groups of similar living things is called Taxonomy. Taxonomy helps us understand how organisms are similar and/or different from each other. It also gives scientists all around the world a common language to use when talking about these organisms.
Humans have been classifying organisms for a very long time. The current way of categorizing and naming organisms was started by a scientist named Carl Linnaeus in the mid 1700’s. He came up with a system that had 7 levels. As the world discovered more and more organisms, we added another level as well as some sub-levels to properly organize Earth’s organisms. Each level groups organisms together based on similar traits. Linnaeus and scientists of his time had to use only traits that they could see. Today, we not only use visual traits, but also DNA to help us categorize. He also started the idea of what we now call the “scientific name.” This is also known as binomial nomenclature, or the “two name way of naming.”
Most organisms have multiple names they are called by. They common name is what the organism is commonly called by people of the area. An organism can have many common names because people of different areas call them different things. For example, the rolly-polly also known as the potato bug, pill bug, woodlouse, sowbug, doodle bug, etc. These names are also given to many species of similar looking bugs. The scientific, binomial name for one species of these animals is Armadillidium vulgare. That way if you are a scientist studying rolly-pollies, you and all other rolly-polly scientists know exactly which species is being discussed no matter the common name that they use.
So, how do we get the scientific, binomial name? It comes from the organism’s genus and species name. Before we get to these two ending levels, let us learn what all of the levels are:
I like to think of each level as a set of boxes. The domain boxes are the largest and currently there are three of them. All organisms on Earth are put into one of the three “domain boxes.” Also within that box are multiple Kingdom boxes that divide the organisms even more. Within one Kingdom box, there are many Phylum boxes, and so on until you get to species. A species is group of similar individual organisms that can successfully breed, or have babies. So the scientific, binomial name of an organism includes the last two levels (genus and species) because they are the most specific way to identify an organism.
These categories also help us learn about the common ancestors that organisms share. Organisms with similar traits and DNA have at one point all come from one common ancestor that no longer exists. Organisms that all belong to the same genus share a more recent common ancestor than all of the organisms in one domain.
So if we take any organism, we can learn more about it based on the taxonomic “boxes” they fit in. In an effort to keep things short today, this is what I will do in tomorrow’s blog post. You can suggest an organism in the quiz below.
