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 ...

Rudbeckia hirta. Solanum lycopersicum. Acer saccharum. Have you ever seen these names on plant tags or seed packets and wondered where they came from? We can thank Carl Linnaeus for taxonomy, the ...

Your 15 March issue honouring Carl Linnaeus brings to mind what is probably his most significant contribution to modern life: the idea that groups of people can be regarded as naturally distinct ...

Broberg, a widely admired authority on Linnaeus, died in 2022. “The Man Who Organized Nature,” capably translated by Anna Paterson, is his last book, the summation of a lifetime of research. Among the ...

About 300 years ago, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus set out on a bold quest: to identify and name every living organism on ...

Taxonomy in an age of transformation. Every plant and animal has a mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I gene, and its sequence helps researchers assign that plant or animal to a given species, with some ...

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 ...

Taxonomy is the science that attempts to categorise the many millions of species on Earth. Find out how to define taxonomy, what taxonomists do and why classifying life is so important. The definition ...