50 Fun Facts About Taxonomy

Roughly what share of Earth's estimated 8.7 million eukaryote species had been described by 2011?

About 14% is all, so most species on Earth still await a name; the Catalogue of Life listed 1.64 million named species across every kingdom as of April 2016.

Which kitchen staple's epithet lycopersicum, 'wolf peach', was borrowed from a plant Galen named?

Tomato is Solanum lycopersicum, and Galen's 'wolf peach' has never been matched to a real plant; botanically it is a berry that is eaten as a vegetable.

Which snake's everyday English name is simply its scientific binomial, a rarity among animals?

Boa constrictor is the only boid commonly called by that name in English, though every boid constricts; its subspecies' colouring earns them the common name 'red-tailed boas'.

Which rorqual's name musculus may be a Linnaeus pun, since the Latin can mean 'little mouse'?

Blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus, whose genus name means 'winged whale', and musculus can equally be read as 'muscle'.

Following his friend Peter Artedi, in which class did Linnaeus first file whales and the manatee?

Fishes held the whales until the 10th edition of 1758 moved them into the mammal class, one of many reshuffles across the twelve editions Linnaeus oversaw.

Which animals did Linnaeus become the first to remove from the birds and classify as mammals?

Bats had sat among the birds in earlier systems until Linnaeus filed them with the mammals, a class he was also the first to name, as Mammalia, in 1758.

Which animal's scientific name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, translates as 'black and white cat-foot'?

Giant panda is the species so named, and for all the cat in its name the animal is a bear, endemic to China.

Which lab workhorse's name means 'black-bellied dew-lover', after the dark end of its abdomen?

Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster takes 'dew-loving' from the Greek drosos and philos, and it haunts orchards, kitchens and pubs wherever fruit ferments.

How many kingdoms do US textbooks traditionally teach, having split the prokaryotes in two?

Six kingdoms, Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaebacteria and Eubacteria, fill American books, while textbooks in Britain, India, Brazil and elsewhere stick to five.

A fungus found in Sarawak, Malaysia, was named in 2011 after which Nickelodeon cartoon character?

SpongeBob gave the fungus the epithet squarepantsii, while its genus Spongiforma describes the sponge-like fruiting body; it is one of only two species in the genus.

Which of the three top-level groups of life takes its name from the Greek for 'ancient things'?

Archaea, Greek for 'ancient things', got the name because the first known members were methane-makers assumed to mirror Earth's primitive atmosphere; they have since turned up in habitats of every kind.

Which eighth rank, proposed in 1990, sits above kingdom at the very top of the modern hierarchy?

Domain was Carl Woese's proposal once ribosomal RNA showed that the prokaryotes fall into two deeply separate lineages, and he had at first called his three primary groupings 'kingdoms'.

Which order did Linnaeus name in 1758 for humans, apes and monkeys, as the 'highest' of animals?

Primates replaced his earlier heading Anthropomorpha, and the same 10th edition gave humans their full two-word name for the first time.

Which non-living kingdom did Linnaeus rank alongside plants and animals in Systema Naturae?

Minerals formed the Regnum Lapideum, and a fourth kingdom of minerals survived as late as 1860 in the scheme that first proposed Protoctista for 'all the lower creatures'.

Which ape's name pairs a Greek god with troglodytes, after a mythical race of cave-dwellers?

Chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes; Troglodyte had first been proposed as its genus name, but the wren's genus had got there first.

Which dog-like African carnivores actually sit on the cat side of Carnivora, among the feliforms?

Hyenas groom, scent-mark and rear their young like other feliforms, and early in their history they split into lightly built dog-like forms and robust bone-crushers.

Humans, sea squirts and the tiny lancelets all belong to which phylum, split into three subphyla?

Chordata's three subphyla are the vertebrates, the tunicates such as sea squirts, and the cephalochordates or lancelets, all sharing a notochord at some stage of life.

Which single order accounts for about 40% of all mammal species, from capybaras to the house mouse?

Rodentia is defined by a single pair of ever-growing incisors in each jaw, and the order's Latin root rodens simply means 'gnawing'.

Which ape's name comes from 'wild men' reported by the Carthaginian navigator Hanno around 500 BC?

Gorilla was chosen as the epithet by Thomas Savage in 1847 from Hanno's 'gorillai', whose skins were reputedly kept at Carthage until Rome destroyed the city in 146 BC.

What is the plural of genus, the rank that groups the lion, tiger and leopard together as Panthera?

Genera is the Latin plural, and because the standards for the rank are not strictly codified, different authorities often carve the same species into different ones.

Which singer was honoured in 2011 by an Australian horse fly with a golden-haired rear end?

Beyoncé's namesake, Scaptia beyonceae, was found in Queensland's Atherton Tablelands in 1981 but waited 30 years for a formal description.

Which Star Wars character names a Chinese trilobite, described in 2005 as its genus's only species?

Han Solo became the trilobite Han solo, the genus Han holding the single species solo, from Middle Ordovician marine beds of the Zitai Formation.

Which US president's hair inspired the name of a moth with yellowish-white head scales in 2017?

Donald Trump's namesake Neopalpa donaldtrumpi was named by Vazrick Nazari to draw attention to fragile US habitats that still hold many undescribed species.

Which musician is honoured by a Malaysian huntsman spider that Peter Jäger described in 2008?

David Bowie's spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, came from the Cameron Highlands of peninsular Malaysia, one of many huntsman species in the genus Heteropoda.

A land snail endemic to Fiji's Viti Levu was named Ba humbugi in a nod to which Dickens character?

Ebenezer Scrooge's catchphrase gave Alan Solem of the Field Museum an 'irresistible impulse' when he created the genus Ba, and the snail is now endangered.

Which actor's Edward Scissorhands role named a Cambrian arthropod from Kootenay National Park?

Johnny Depp's Kootenichela deppi is Middle Cambrian, and cladistic analysis makes it the sister taxon of Worthenella.

When a species epithet honours a person or place, how must its first letter be written?

Always lowercase is the rule even for proper nouns, while the genus name takes the capital; in normal text both parts are italicised, or underlined in handwriting.

Passer domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758) is bracketed because Linnaeus first put the sparrow in which genus?

Fringilla domestica was the original name, and the parentheses signal that the species has since been moved to a different genus while Linnaeus keeps the credit.

What is a name such as Bison bison, where the genus and species words are identical, called?

Tautonym names are legal for animals, even the three-word Bison bison bison, but the plant code bans them outright, which is why no plant is Larix larix today.

Which principle says the oldest available name is the valid one when an animal has been named twice?

Priority sent 19th-century zoologists digging up the oldest possible names, challenging those used by Louis Agassiz, Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen.

What is a name published without an adequate description, and so unusable as it stands, called?

Nomen nudum looks exactly like a scientific name and may even have been meant as one, but it cannot be accepted as it stands; the plural is nomina nuda.

Which Greek-for-'branch' term did Julian Huxley coin in 1957 for an ancestor and all its descendants?

Clade, also called a monophyletic group, had a forerunner in 1876, when Julian Huxley's grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley proposed a classification built on much the same idea.

What kind of group is traditional 'Reptilia', which leaves out the birds that share its ancestor?

Paraphyletic groups keep an ancestor but drop some of its descendants, and the word gained currency in the cladistics debates of the 1960s and 1970s to needle exactly such familiar taxa.

Which German entomologist drafted the basis of cladistics, published in 1950, as a prisoner of war?

Willi Hennig called his approach 'phylogenetic systematics', and a substantially revised English translation in 1966 made it the most common way of classifying organisms.

Which American plant ecologist first proposed the five-kingdom classification of life in 1969?

Robert Whittaker's scheme of Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and a fifth kingdom for the bacteria became a textbook standard for decades and still underlies most multi-kingdom systems.

Which British biologist created the kingdom Chromista in 1981, at first mainly for algae?

Tom Cavalier-Smith later pulled many protozoa into Chromista as well, and his schemes ran to seven or eight kingdoms, replacing Protista with Protozoa and Chromista.

Which French biologist coined 'prokaryote' and 'eukaryote' in 1925, terms popularised only in 1962?

Édouard Chatton barely elaborated on the distinction, and it took Roger Stanier and Cornelis van Niel's 1962 article 'The Concept of a Bacterium' to make it the basic split in cell biology.

Which Swiss botanist coined the word 'taxonomy' in his 1813 Théorie élémentaire de la botanique?

Augustin de Candolle's book also introduced a new 'natural' classification system, and the journal Candollea still carries the family name in systematic botany.

Which Montpellier botanist first published the concept of plant families, in his Prodromus of 1689?

Pierre Magnol is remembered in the magnolia, named after him by Plumier in 1703, and his pupils included Tournefort and the Jussieu brothers.

Whose Pinax theatri botanici pruned plant descriptions to two words, a century before Linnaeus?

Gaspard Bauhin's Pinax, published in Basel, described some 6,000 plants, and many of its genus names were later adopted by Linnaeus himself.

Whose Historia plantarum of 1686 offered one of the first biological definitions of a species?

John Ray defined a species as a group of morphologically similar organisms arising from a common ancestor, and he classified plants by observed likeness rather than by repeated dichotomous division.

Whose 1857 letter to Joseph Hooker was long thought the earliest use of 'hair-splitters & lumpers'?

Charles Darwin's joke stuck: a 'splitter' carves fine new categories while a 'lumper' folds differing samples into broad ones, and the argument runs through every corner of taxonomy.

Which city's 2011 congress renamed the botanical code to cover algae, fungi and plants?

Melbourne's code also first allowed names of new taxa to be published electronically only, with no paper copies deposited in libraries.

Which entities are classified by their own committee, the ICTV, into top-level groups called 'realms'?

Viruses numbered 16,213 named species in the ICTV's 2025 taxonomy, spread across 368 families, 22 phyla and 7 realms.

Which genus, the milkvetches and locoweeds, is the largest plant genus by described species?

Astragalus runs to more than 3,000 species of herbs and small shrubs in the pea family Fabaceae, with goat's-thorn among its other common names.

Order names for plants, fungi and algae all end in which suffix, as in Dictyotales?

-ales marks a botanical order, while -aceae marks a family, so Rosaceae takes its name from the genus Rosa; owls, by contrast, fill the zoological order Strigiformes.

Under which heading did the first five editions of Systema Naturae list the hydra and the unicorn?

Paradoxa, 'contradictory animals', held ten suspect creatures and was dropped from the 6th edition of 1748; Linnaeus wrote up the hydra's seven heads from a specimen preserved in Hamburg.

What does sapiens, the species epithet Linnaeus gave humans in 1758, translate to in English?

Wise is the meaning of sapiens, giving 'wise man' or 'knowledgeable man', and the two-word form first appeared in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae in 1758.

The epithet officinalis, as in Salvia officinalis, refers to an officina, meaning what kind of room?

A monastery storeroom, where medicines and other necessaries were kept, is the root, and the epithet marks organisms, mainly plants, used in medicine, herbalism, manufacturing and cookery.

Which rank-free naming code established its first 300 names in a companion volume published in 2020?

PhyloCode names groups by ancestry instead of Linnaean rank, leaving species names to the rank-based codes, and its version 6 was released in June 2020.