A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

Carl Linnaeus's use of erotic language to describe plants ultimately helped him to recruit a global network of specimen collectors. In August 1749, Pehr Kalm, a medical student from Finland, travelled ...

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. Translation: God created, Linnaeus organized. This was Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s mantra. Considered the father of modern taxonomy, Linnaeus created a system ...

Each flash card is printed on the recto side only and has a small engraved illustration (some are lightly hand-colored) with two numbered questions The booklet, which has 38 pages, contains answers to ...

Last summer on a warm Paris morning, a few dozen members of the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature gathered at the National Museum of Natural History. The occasion was a talk by Jason ...

A new naming structure proposed by an American researcher moves beyond the Linnaeus system to one based on the genetic sequence of each individual organism. This creates a more robust, precise, and ...

A band of renegade biologists is taking on a mammoth task that threatens to upset a status quo that has been unchallenged for almost 250 years. Put simply, they want to change the way scientists name ...

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 ...

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 ...