classification of living organisms

• traditionally living things have been classified into groups depending on their structure and characteristics in a system developed by Carl Linnaeus.
• Linnaeus classified things into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. organisms are named by the binomial system of genus and species.
• as evidence of internal structures became more developed due to improvements in microscopes and the understanding of biochemical processes progressed, new models of classification were proposed due to evidence from a chemical analysis there is a three domain system made by Carl Woese divided into:

  • archaea - primitive bacteria living in extreme environment
  • bacteria
  • eukaryota - protists, fungi plants and animals