The relevance of taxonomy in our genomic era is greater than ever. Correct naming is crucial for developing new foods and medicines, and for understanding our changing environment. Amazingly, we do ...

Two recent calamities, geographically distanced, began in the death of trees. A landslide annihilated two villages of Wayanad district in Kerala. Two oceans west, in Brazil, a new viral disease ...

Carl Linnaeus developed the Latin two-word system for organising the natural world that is still in use today, writes ENDA O'DOHERTY The botanist Carolus Linnaeus was born Carl Nilsson Linnaeus in ...

Biologists love Linnaeus. Biology students? Not so much. Carolus Linnaeus was the Swedish scholar who back in the 1750s devised a naming system for all living things. His classifications are now short ...

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 ...

One of the most basic human urges is to sort things into categories, look for patterns and apply labels. "Oh, blessed rage to order," the poet Wallace Stevens called it. Since ancient times, ...

The classification of species allows the subdivision of living organisms into smaller and more specialised groups. The binomial system is important because it allows scientists to accurately identify ...

One of the most basic human urges is to sort things into categories, look for patterns and apply labels. "Oh, blessed rage to order," the poet Wallace Stevens called it. Since ancient times, ...