by What is CLASSIFICATION? CLASSIFICATION Have you ever sorted NUMBERS! your toys, books or Carl Linnaeus The year Carl Linnaeus clothes into different The Man Who Named Nature was born groups? Perhaps you 1707 Carl Linnaeus (Lin-ay-us) was born in 1707, over 300 years have grouped things Plant and animal together by colour, 40,000 specimens in ago, in Sweden. As a boy, he was very interested in the shape or size – this Linnaeus’ collections is like classification Books in his library natural world, especially BOTANY, the study of plants. His (taxonomy). 1,600 father Nils taught him that every plant had a name. By the CLASSIFICATION is the study of putting all living things into groups. The age of Linnaeus when he died time he was five, Carl had his own small garden and could 71 Why are NAMES important? The year Linnaeus named name all of the plants he had grown. us Homo sapiens (ho-mo If we didn’t know the names of all the animals, plants 1758 sah-pe-ens), which means When he was older, Carl studied and fungi, we wouldn’t know when something ‘wise man’, in his book was new, or if something had become SYSTEMA NATURAE medicine, but he was still interested extinct – we wouldn’t be able to measure in nature. In Carl’s day, the plants life on the planet. 8.7* and animals had long scientific What did LINNAEUS do? million Carl Linnaeus created a system Estimated species on names in Latin. It was hard to keep called BINOMIAL naming (bye-no- planet Earth track of everything because they me-al). Binomial means ‘two words’ – every plant and animal that he knew About 1.5* million were difficult to remember. Carl about was given a GENUS name and a species have a developed a way to name things SPECIES name, in Latin. Linnaeus’ system BINOMIAL NAME. has made it easier for scientists all over the world Scientists are with only two categories: to communicate about life on Earth. working on the rest!

GENUS and SPECIES

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s Carl Linnaeus would look at a species and see what was different about m

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e it. It might be a certain colour, size, texture or be from a certain place. t

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m He would use this information in the BINOMIAL name.

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’ s How about this ladybird? In America, this is called a ladybug; in i

L y k l other countries it’s a lady beetle. So how do we know it’s the same n r m o a o thing? Its BINOMIAL name tells us: Coccinella septempunctata w C n n xo GENUS: Coccinella (co-chi-nella) means BRIGHT RED a Ta Coccinella septempunctata s of SPECIES: septempunctata (sept-em-punk-tata) means SEVEN POINTS BRIGHT RED SEVEN POINTS the ‘Father CAN YOU SEE WHY IT WAS NAMED THIS WAY? The Linnean Society of London Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BF www.linnean.org e: [email protected] Charity Reference No. 220509

*Species information taken from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP – unep.org) and Science (no. 25 – sciencemag.org) Programme taken (UNEPfrom the – unep.org)United Nations and *SpeciesScience Environment (no. information

Images: Linnaeus/Nautilus © The Linnean Society of London; Earth from NASA Public Domain (nasaimages.org); Sorted colours © Jenn Huls 2013, licensed from Shutterstock.com; Ladybird © irin-k 2013, licensed from Shutterstock.com