The man to the left is named Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher and scientists who hailed from the 4th century. Aristotle was the first recorded human to attempt to classify all living organisms and did this by dividing organisms into two different groups, plants and animals. Then he took all of the animals and divided them into two different groups, weather or not they had blood, and finally, he divided the animals into 3 more groups according to how they moved around in their habitat, like walking, flying or swimming. Since Aristotle focused more upon the behavior of the organisms and not the apparent similarities, the system ended up flawed, pairing things such as crocodiles and fish, since they both swim.
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Around a thousand years later, the roman empire began to look into classification, tried to be more specific and lead classification down into individual organism types. The romans did a good job and despite the limitations and flaws of the new classification system, it was still widely used until around the end of the 1600s. The more organisms they encountered, the higher the need to separate similar types of organisms, such as two types of eagles, or the crocodile and the alligator, which increased the time taken for classification to a ludicrous amount.
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Then in the 18th century, a naturalist scientist named Carolus Linnaeus became known as the founder of modern classification, due to him developing his own classification system that has been modified but is still used today. In his
system he divided everything into two different kingdoms, kingdom animalia and kingdom plante, which we have further improved on and now have 5 kingdoms. Carolus also added Genus and species to the process of classification, terms still used today. He developed the system known as binomial nomenclature and began to organize all species in order to have a genus and a species. This system also brought members of similar features and families, such as the wolves, closer together due to the name of their genus. |
The way to classify species has changed before, and it will continue to change as we progress as a race. With progress come new ways of naming animals, such as with the addition of DNA, we had to re evaluate and re-classify some animals who had been incorrectly placed. DNA analysis helped us find things that we couldn't see before, such as how genetically close some organisms are related to each other. The future may hold ways for the nomenclature to change completely.
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