Ever heard of a roly poly? What about a potato bug? A pill bug? Wood louse?

All of these names are

actually common names for the same organism. Imagine how confusing it would be to keep track of
all living things if different people used their own names. For scientists, the use of common names
and different languages started to make the study of life more complicated than it already was.

Linnaeus developed binomial nomenclature.

In order to create one system that could be used universally, Carolus Linnaeus developed binomial

nomenclature. This is a system that uses two names to identify an organism. Specifically, it uses the
genus and species names. We'll look at what that means a little later, but let's first look at how
binomial nomenclature is used. In order to correctly write a name in this system, the first letter of
the genus must be capitalized and the entire name must be written in italics. For example, the
scientific name for a house cat is Felis catus. For the common goldfish, it is Carassius auratus.

During his studies, Linnaeus classified and named over 11,000 organisms. He based his classification
on morphology, which is basically what an organism looks like. The chart below shows the
morphology of leaves. While we now use genetics to classify organisms, Linnaeus is still one of the
most memorable people involved in taxonomy, which is the study of naming and classifying
organisms.

Hierarchical Classification

Now that we know why scientific names are used and how they are written, let's look at the
hierarchical system of creating these names. Linnaeus developed a system that went from broadest
to most specific. The levels of classification he used are: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family,
genus, and species. You can see that genus and species are the two most specific categories, which is
why they are used in binomial nomenclature to identify an organism. A good way to remember the
order of classification from broadest to most specific is to use a mnemonic device. While there are
countless mnemonic devices out there, I always remember the order
using: King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti. The first letter of each word corresponds to the
first letter of each level of organization, making it easy to remember.

A good way to think of how this system helps us identify groups of related organisms is to compare it
to your address. You could identify very broadly where you live by just providing the continent, but
you could also very specifically provide your house or apartment number. Let's look at an example of
this comparing an address to the levels of organization used by Linnaeus. We can compare kingdom
with the continent, phylum with the country, class with the state, order with the zip code, family
with city, genus with street, and species with apartment number. We see here how this all lines up
and helps to identify different levels. We could talk about all of the members of the same class just
as we could talk about all of the people within one state, while you could more specifically talk about
one species like you could talk about the people living in the same house.

The Six Kingdoms

A long time ago, scientists used just two kingdoms for the classification of living things: plants and
animals. As our understanding of life has changed over the past few centuries, we have revised the
kingdoms to reflect this. Currently, we use a six-kingdom setup. The kingdoms are: Archaebacteria,
Eubacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. Each kingdom has specific characteristics allowing
taxonomists to accurately group organisms.

We will look at the importance and evolutionary history of these six kingdoms later. For now, let's
just distinguish between the six different kingdoms. They are classified based on their cell type and
number as well as how they get food.

1.
a. The beak is stout and heavy……………………………. go to 2
b. The beak is long and slender……………………………. Certhidea
2. c
a. Bottom surface of the lower beak is flat and straight...…………Geospiza
b. Bottom surface of the lower beak is curved……………… go to 3
3. c
a. The lower edge of the upper beak is flat…………………. Platyspiza
b. The lower edge of the upper beak is bent.………………. Camarhynchus