100 Fun Facts About Taxonomy

A 2011 study put Earth's eukaryote species at 8.7 million and found most of them were what?

Not yet named: the study reckoned about 86% of species still awaited description, a backlog that could take taxonomists 1,200 years at the pace of the time.

Which fruit's species epithet lycopersicum comes from the Greek for 'wolf peach'?

Tomato is Solanum lycopersicum once more: Philip Miller moved it out of Linnaeus's potato genus into one of its own, Lycopersicon, and genetic evidence later sent it back.

Why is 'boa constrictor' a rarity among English animal names?

It is also the binomial, Boa constrictor, one of the few scientific names to enter everyday speech; every boa squeezes its prey, yet only this species goes by the name.

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

Blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus, 'winged whale' plus a word that can mean 'muscle' or 'little mouse', possibly Linnaeus's joke about the largest animal known to have lived.

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, grouped with the birds in older systems, did Linnaeus classify as mammals?

Bats, the only mammals capable of true flight, were placed by Linnaeus in 1758 in the same order as humans, apes and monkeys, under the genus Vespertilio.

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.

US textbooks traditionally teach six kingdoms rather than five by splitting which old kingdom in two?

Monera, the old kingdom of cells without a nucleus, becomes two kingdoms of bacteria in American books, while textbooks in Britain, India and Brazil keep it whole and stop at 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.

Archaea were named 'ancient things' because the first known members made which gas, thought to mirror early Earth?

Methane makers were the first archaea known, and their chemistry was assumed to echo Earth's primitive atmosphere; the group has 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'.

Linnaeus's order Primates, home to humans, apes and monkeys, takes its name from Latin for what?

First in rank: Linnaeus thought this the highest order of animals and put humans in it, replacing his earlier heading Anthropomorpha, 'man-shaped'.

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

Minerals formed Linnaeus's Regnum Lapideum beside the animals and plants, the three kingdoms behind the parlour-game question 'animal, vegetable or mineral?'

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 is named for the notochord, a stiffening rod that sea squirts have only as swimming larvae, before they settle down as sessile adults.

Which single order accounts for about 40% of all mammal species?

Rodentia, from the Latin for 'gnawing', share a pair of incisors in each jaw that never stop growing, so capybaras and house mice alike must gnaw to keep them worn down.

Which primate is named after a tribe of hairy people reported by the Carthaginian navigator Hanno around 500 BC?

Gorilla was the epithet Thomas Savage chose in 1847 from Hanno's 'Gorillai', whose skins were reputedly kept at Carthage; whether Hanno met gorillas, other apes or people is unknown.

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's trilobite is Han solo; the paper explains 'solo' as the last survivor of its family, but Samuel Turvey later said friends had dared him to name a species after a Star Wars character.

Which US president was honoured in 2017 by a tiny moth found in Southern California and northern Mexico?

Donald Trump's namesake Neopalpa donaldtrumpi has yellowish-white head scales that reminded Vazrick Nazari of his hair, and Nazari hoped the name would draw attention to fragile habitats.

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

David Bowie's spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, nods to songs such as 'Glass Spider' and to his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

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

Ebenezer Scrooge's catchphrase 'Bah, humbug' gave Alan Solem an 'irresistible impulse' once he had named the genus Ba after Fiji's Ba District.

A Cambrian arthropod with scissor-like claws, found in Kootenay National Park, was named after which actor?

Johnny Depp played Edward Scissorhands, the character David Legg said he could not help thinking of when he first saw the fossil's pair of claws.

In modern usage, how is the first letter of a species epithet written when it honours a person or place?

Always lowercase today, even for proper nouns, while the genus takes the capital; botanical works before the 1950s often capitalised epithets taken from the names of people or places.

What do the brackets in 'Passer domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758)' signal?

Changed genus: Linnaeus named the house sparrow Fringilla domestica, and the brackets keep his name attached after the bird's move to Passer.

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 is Latin for 'naked name': it looks exactly like a scientific name and may have been meant as one, but it was published with no adequate description to clothe it.

Which Greek-for-'branch' term, used by Julian Huxley in 1957, now names an ancestor and all its descendants?

Clade was Huxley's label for what cladogenesis leaves behind, the splitting of one species into two, so each clade is a single branch of the tree of life.

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; crocodiles are closer kin to birds than to lizards, so a Reptilia without birds is incomplete.

Which German entomologist drafted his 'phylogenetic systematics', published in 1950, while a prisoner of war?

Willi Hennig began the work in captivity in 1945, and a much revised English translation in 1966 spread his method of grouping organisms strictly by shared descent.

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

Robert Whittaker's scheme gave the fungi a kingdom of their own, apart from the plants, beside Animalia, Plantae, Protista and a kingdom for the bacteria, and it was the textbook standard for decades.

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

Tom Cavalier-Smith's Chromista gathered brown algae, diatoms and water moulds, and by 1994 he and his colleagues were themselves saying the group was probably not a single lineage.

Which French biologist coined 'prokaryote' and 'eukaryote' between the world wars, 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 also noticed that a plant's leaves kept to a near-24-hour cycle even in constant light, an early sign that living things carry an internal clock.

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

Pierre Magnol is remembered in the magnolia, a flowering tree from Martinique that Charles Plumier named after him in 1703, and Tournefort was among his students.

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

Gaspard Bauhin's Pinax described thousands of plants, and Linnaeus later adopted many of its genus names for his own system.

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

John Ray defined a species as similar organisms arising from a common ancestor, and he divided plants by whether the seedling has one leaf or two, a split botanists kept.

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

Charles Darwin wrote 'It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers', but a researcher later found the naturalist Edward Newman drawing the same contrast in 1845.

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

Melbourne's code also dropped the rule that new plants be described in Latin, allowing English, and let names be published online only, with no paper copies in libraries.

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

Viruses gained their first realm, Riboviria, in 2018; unlike the top-level groups of cellular life, a realm's viruses need not share a common ancestor.

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

Astragalus belongs to the pea family; some of its species are North America's locoweeds, several of which carry swainsonine, an alkaloid that poisons grazing livestock.

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

-ales marks an order of plants, fungi or algae, as in Dictyotales, and -aceae a family; bird and fish orders end in -iformes, but mammal orders such as Artiodactyla follow no set pattern.

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

Paradoxa listed ten suspect creatures and was dropped from the 6th edition of 1748; of the seven-headed hydra preserved in Hamburg, Linnaeus wrote that it was a fraud, betrayed by its weasel teeth.

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

Wise is the sense of sapiens; the other options are real too: Homo erectus is 'upright man', Homo habilis 'handy man' and Homo ergaster 'working man', named for its better tools.

The epithet officinalis, as in Salvia officinalis, comes from officina, which in medieval Latin meant what?

A monastery storeroom, where medicines were kept, is the medieval sense of officina, which in classical Latin meant a workshop; the epithet marks plants used in medicine, herbalism and cookery.

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

PhyloCode names groups by ancestry and leaves species names to the rank-based codes; first made public as a draft in 2000, it took effect only when its companion volume, Phylonyms, came out in 2020.

Which African mammal, long grouped with pigs, is the closest living relative of whales?

Hippopotamus blood proteins and DNA both place the animal beside whales, dolphins and porpoises, a line it split from about 55 million years ago. The ridges on its molars had led naturalists to pair it with pigs.

Which sauropod name was merged into Apatosaurus in 1903, then revived by a fossil study in 2015?

Brontosaurus, the 'thunder lizard', was named by Othniel Marsh in 1879, two years after his Apatosaurus. Elmer Riggs judged the two too alike to keep apart, and the later name was dropped.

Which Australian animal's first specimen was judged a fake in 1799, sewn together from several creatures?

Platypus skins seemed so unlikely that George Shaw took scissors to his specimen to check for stitches. He went on to publish the first scientific description of the animal that same year.

Modern classification places birds inside which group of reptiles, as the only living theropods?

Dinosaurs never fully died out: birds evolved from earlier theropods and are the only members of the group alive today, with more than 11,000 living species.

Which so-called whale, an apex predator in every ocean, is the largest member of the dolphin family?

Orca pods earned the name 'killer whale' because sailors saw them hunt larger whales. Like every dolphin, the orca is a toothed whale, just the biggest of nearly 40 species in its family.

Which popular 'nut' is botanically a legume, in the family Fabaceae alongside beans and lentils?

Peanut pods ripen underground, which led Linnaeus to name the species hypogaea, from the Greek for 'under the earth'. Like other legumes, the plant hosts nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its roots.

Termites, long given an order of their own, are now classified as a branch of which household insects?

Cockroaches turned out to include termites, whose nearest kin are wood-eating roaches of the genus Cryptocercus. The old termite order, Isoptera, was folded into the roach order as a result.

Which bird name is shared by Europe's Erithacus rubecula and America's unrelated Turdus migratorius?

Robin was borrowed for the American bird because of its reddish-orange breast, but the European original is an Old World flycatcher. Mix-ups like this are why science prefers one formal name per species.

Which usually sterile hybrid has a male donkey for a father and a female horse for a mother?

Mule cells carry 63 chromosomes, 32 from the horse and 31 from the donkey, and that odd number usually leaves the animal infertile. Swap the parents' roles and the foal is a hinny.

What does 'rex' mean in Tyrannosaurus rex, the name Henry Fairfield Osborn gave a fossil in 1905?

King is what rex means in Latin, so the full name reads 'tyrant lizard king'. Osborn also named a second skeleton Dynamosaurus imperiosus, then realised in 1906 that it was the same animal.

As Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog is classed as a subspecies of which wild animal?

Gray wolf, Canis lupus, has had more than thirty subspecies recognised, the dog and the dingo among them. Some authorities instead list the dog as a species of its own, Canis familiaris.

Which Australian animal's scientific name, Phascolarctos cinereus, translates as 'ash-coloured pouch bear'?

Koala bears are not bears at all: settlers called the marsupial the 'native bear' for its looks, and the Greek genus name kept the idea. Its closest living relatives are the wombats.

Which animal's species epithet, camelopardalis, combines the Greek words for 'camel' and 'leopard'?

Giraffe was 'camelopard' in older English too, a nod to its camel-like shape and leopard-like colouring. Linnaeus first filed the animal among the deer, as Cervus camelopardalis, in 1758.

Spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites belong to which class, whose name recalls a boastful weaver of Greek myth?

Arachnids take their name from the Greek arachne, 'spider', also the name of the mythical weaver who was turned into one. Almost all adults have eight legs, two more than any adult insect.

Which class of vertebrates unites frogs and salamanders with the limbless, worm-like caecilians?

Amphibians number about 8,000 known species, and nearly 90% of them are frogs. The caecilians are the rarity, with only around 215 species.

In which country was the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus born in 1707 and later honoured on banknotes?

Sweden claims Linnaeus, born in the Småland village of Råshult, though he took his medical degree abroad at Harderwijk, a Dutch university known for awarding degrees in as little as a week.

Which Greek philosopher divided animals into those with blood and those without, in his History of Animals?

Aristotle spent two years studying the wildlife of Lesbos and named some 500 species. His blooded and bloodless groups line up with what zoologists now call vertebrates and invertebrates.

Neanderthals take their name from a valley where telltale bones were found in 1856, in which country?

Germany's Neander Valley was itself named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century theologian and hymn writer who often visited. The bones found there became the type specimen, Neanderthal 1.

Which insects make up Coleoptera, the largest order of animals, with about 400,000 described species?

Beetles make up about a quarter of all known animal species. The order's Greek name means 'sheath wing', after the hardened front wings that shield the flying pair.

Which simple sea animals, lacking true tissues and organs, make up the phylum Porifera?

Sponges have bodies full of pores and channels that let water circulate through them. They get by without the complex nervous, digestive or circulatory systems of other animals.

Corals share the phylum Cnidaria, named from the Greek for 'nettle', with which drifting sea animals?

Jellyfish, corals and anemones all carry cnidocytes, stinging cells that fire harpoon-like threads at prey. The look-alike comb jellies belong to a phylum of their own, Ctenophora.

Bamboo can grow 91 cm in a day and tower like a tree, yet belongs to which plant family, Poaceae?

Grasses include the giant bamboos, their largest members, with stalks up to 46 metres long. Maize, wheat and rice are far smaller relatives in the same family.

Which cell structure, absent in all bacteria, defines the group that unites animals, plants and fungi?

Nucleus is what the word eukaryote points to: its Greek roots mean 'true kernel'. Cells that lack one are prokaryotes, a name that means 'before the kernel'.

Which microscopic 'water bears', able to survive exposure to outer space, make up a phylum of their own?

Tardigrades got their formal name from Lazzaro Spallanzani in the 1770s: it means 'slow walkers'. The nickname water bear also describes their lumbering, bear-like gait.

Which great apes of Indonesia and Malaysia make up the genus Pongo, split into three species since 2017?

Orangutans gained a third species in 2017, the Tapanuli orangutan of Sumatra. In a twist, its closest relative is the Bornean species rather than its Sumatran neighbour.

How is a species name such as Homo sapiens printed by convention, with underlining used in handwriting?

In italics is the tradition for both parts of a species name. After a name has been given in full, the genus is often cut to an initial, which is how Tyrannosaurus rex became T. rex.

Which gut bacterium, a staple of genetics labs, is named after the paediatrician who found it in 1885?

E. coli is short for Escherichia coli, honouring Theodor Escherich, who found the microbe in the faeces of healthy people. It lives in the lower intestine and is mostly harmless.

Which 'living fossil' tree, widely planted along city streets, is the last surviving species of its order?

Ginkgo biloba is the sole survivor of an order that first appeared over 290 million years ago. Long thought extinct in the wild, it lived on through cultivation in East Asia.

The extinct dodo of Mauritius was a flightless member of which bird family, as DNA confirmed in 2002?

Pigeons and doves count the dodo among their own: its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon of Southeast Asia. The 2002 study, led by Beth Shapiro, was the first to analyse dodo DNA.

Which tough substance, also found in insect shells, forms fungal cell walls where plants use cellulose?

Chitin in the cell wall is one of the traits that puts fungi in a kingdom apart from plants. Like animals, fungi cannot photosynthesise and must absorb their food.

Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish form which class of molluscs, with a Greek name meaning 'head-feet'?

Cephalopoda means 'head-feet' because the arms, modified from the foot of ancestral molluscs, ring the head. Nearly all members can squirt a cloud of dark ink, which is why fishers call them 'inkfish'.

Starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers share which phylum, whose adults usually show five-part symmetry?

Echinodermata live on the sea bed at every depth, from tidal shallows to the abyss. Their larvae start out bilaterally symmetrical, like us, and only later grow in five parts around a centre.

Echidnas belong to which order of mammals, the only ones alive that lay eggs rather than bear live young?

Monotremes are named from the Greek for 'single hole', after the one opening they use for waste and reproduction. Only five species survive, and the mothers still nurse their young with milk.

Which reptiles are the closest living relatives of birds, as the only other surviving archosaurs?

Crocodilians and birds are the last of the archosaurs, a group marked out by extra openings in the skull. A crocodile is therefore closer kin to a hummingbird than to any lizard.

Which composite organisms, a fungus living with algae, are given the scientific name of the fungus alone?

Lichens were the life form that first brought the word 'symbiosis' into biology. The algal partner carries a scientific name of its own, with no link to the name of the lichen.

Which prokaryotes, long misnamed 'blue-green algae', were the first organisms known to produce oxygen?

Cyanobacteria take their name from their cyan, bluish-green colour. By releasing oxygen over billions of years, they are thought to have turned Earth's early atmosphere into one with free oxygen.

Amoebas, kelp and slime moulds were long lumped into which kingdom of mostly single-celled eukaryotes?

Protista is a kingdom defined by exclusion: any eukaryote that is not an animal, a land plant or a fungus. Its members turned out to span the entire eukaryote family tree.

Which identification tool leads a user to a name through paired choices, each pair known as a couplet?

Dichotomous key is the commonest kind of identification key, and each step offers two mutually exclusive statements. Lamarck is credited with the first analytical keys, in his French flora of 1778.

What is a collection of preserved plant specimens called, a tradition traced back to 16th-century Italy?

Herbarium collections go back to Luca Ghini, a Bologna physician who had students study real plants instead of classical texts. The oldest to survive was made by Gherardo Cibo around 1532.

Which process gave dolphins and ichthyosaurs the same streamlined shape despite separate ancestry?

Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages. The camera eyes of squid and vertebrates are a famous case: their last shared ancestor had at most a light-sensitive spot.

Which University of Illinois microbiologist redrew the tree of life in 1977 by comparing ribosomal RNA?

Carl Woese found that some microbes filed with the bacteria were a separate branch of life altogether. His 1977 paper has been called one of the most influential in microbiology.

Who defined a species as a group that breeds only among itself, in Systematics and the Origin of Species?

Ernst Mayr sharpened the idea into the biological species concept and staunchly defended it against rival definitions. He had begun as a bird collector, gathering thousands of skins in New Guinea.

Which technique, proposed by Paul Hebert in 2003, identifies a species from a short stretch of one gene?

DNA barcoding for animals usually reads part of the COI gene, found in mitochondrial DNA. Hebert's team called the resulting profiles 'barcodes' and pictured a global identification database.

Which term names the one specimen, usually kept in a museum, on which a species description is based?

Holotype status can belong to a pinned butterfly, a single fossil leg bone or even an illustration. It is the one example that was used when the species was formally described.

Which term describes a genus with only one living species, such as the aardvark's Orycteropus?

Monotypic groups can stack up: the aardvark is also the only living member of its family and of its whole order, Tubulidentata. The dugong likewise sits alone in its genus.

Which 1753 book by Linnaeus is the official starting point for the scientific names of most plants?

Species Plantarum listed every plant species then known and was the first work to give them two-word names consistently. Before it, a single species could carry a descriptive phrase a dozen words long.

Which former kingdom, named from the Greek for 'single', held all bacteria in the five-kingdom scheme?

Monera was broken up after ribosomal RNA studies in 1977 showed its members belong to two very different lineages. The name dates from 1866, when it covered supposedly structureless blobs of plasma.

Which Greek scholar from Lesbos is often called the 'father of botany' for his Enquiry into Plants?

Theophrastus sorted plants by how they reproduce, where they grow, their size and their uses. He went on to head the Lyceum in Athens, taking over when its founder fled the city.

Which Jena zoologist coined 'phylum', 'ecology' and 'phylogeny', and illustrated Art Forms in Nature?

Ernst Haeckel named thousands of new species and mapped a genealogical tree relating all forms of life. His plates of sea creatures went on to influence the Art Nouveau movement.

Which seabird is Puffinus puffinus to science, because its cured chicks were once called puffins?

Manx shearwater was 'Manks puffin' in the 17th century, and the scientific name froze that usage. The Atlantic puffin took over the English word much later, possibly because it nests in a similar way.