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 ...

Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) was a Swedish botanist who devised the binomial classification system, a two-part naming system to identify, classify and name organisms from bacteria to elephant. Carl ...

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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.

These drawings show the characteristic, species-specific pigment patterns of both 'leech varieties' in remarkable detail. Cuvier's original figures are of the same quality as recently published ...

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But in the 1730s, the self-proclaimed “prince of botany” made a contribution to taxonomy that, at the time, was just as profound as any of his other achievements. After realizing that floral sex parts ...

Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander published little in his lifetime. But through his botanic collections from his travels and a rigorous application of a revolutionary naming system, he laid important ...

Deep beneath the headquarters of the Linnean Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, is a bomb-proof room built at the height of the Cold War to protect the collections of the Swedish naturalist ...