Linnaeus Classification

• • There are millions of species of organisms on Earth
  • A species is defined as a group of organisms that can reproduce to produce fertile offspring
  • These species can be classified into groups by the features that they share eg. all mammals have bodies covered in hair, feed young from mammary glands and have external ears (pinnas)
• • Traditionally living things have been classified into groups depending on their structure and characteristics in a system developed by Carl Linnaeus.
  • Organisms were first classified by a Swedish naturalist called Linnaeus in a way that allows the subdivision of living organisms into smaller and more specialised groups
  • The species in these groups have more and more features in common the more subdivided they get
• • He named organisms in Latin using the binomial system where the scientific name of an organism is made up of two parts starting with the genus (always given a capital letter) and followed by the species (starting with a lower case letter)
  • When typed binomial names are always in italics (which indicates they are Latin) e.g. Homo sapiens
  • The sequence of classification is: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

  
• The order of classification can be remembered by using a mnemonic like:

  K ING P HILIP C AME O VER F OR G RAN’S S PAGHETTI