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 ...

These drawings show the characteristic, species-specific pigment patterns of both 'leech varieties' in remarkable detail. Cuvier's original figures are of the same quality as recently published ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...