Classification is a natural human propensity—we organize our clothes, our kitchen cupboards, and our toys. This applies to the natural world, too, where animals and plants are grouped based on ...

Kevin de Queiroz, a zoologist and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History backs a movement to change the way we name species. I quoted him in a story on Carolus Linnaeus, who's ...

Rudbeckia hirta. Solanum lycopersicum. Acer saccharum. Have you ever seen these names on plant tags or seed packets and wondered where they came from? We can thank Carl Linnaeus for taxonomy, the ...

Broberg, a widely admired authority on Linnaeus, died in 2022. “The Man Who Organized Nature,” capably translated by Anna Paterson, is his last book, the summation of a lifetime of research. Among the ...

Linnaean taxonomy is still a cornerstone of biology, but modern DNA techniques have erased many of the established boundaries between species. This has made identifying species difficult in practice, ...

Taxonomy in an age of transformation. Every plant and animal has a mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I gene, and its sequence helps researchers assign that plant or animal to a given species, with some ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. From Mr Johnny Reed. Sir, Despite the protestations of government, it would seem that even HM Revenue & Customs ...