Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Meaning: a prefix used to make words with a sense opposite to that of the root word; in this case, meaning "without" or "-less". This is usually used to describe organisms without a certain characteristic, as well as organisms in which that characteristic may not be immediately obvious.
In the English language, many animals have different names depending on whether they are male, female, young, domesticated, or in groups. The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans , an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners . [ 1 ]
The binomial name often reflects limited knowledge or hearsay about a species at the time it was named. For instance Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee, and Troglodytes troglodytes, the wren, are not necessarily cave-dwellers. Sometimes a genus name or specific descriptor is simply the Latin or Greek name for the animal (e.g. Canis is Latin for ...
This means that in the system of nomenclature for animals, the name of a species is composed of a combination of a generic name and a specific name; together they make a "binomen". [5] No other rank can have a name composed of two names. Examples: Species Giraffa camelopardalis
homonym: names spelled identically, but, in some codes, names spelled similarly, as defined by the code senior homonym (zoology): the first legitimate use of the name which generally takes priority; junior homonym (zoology), later homonym (botany): a later and generally illegitimate use, though in some circumstances the later name is allowed to ...
The species name is also called a binomial, that is, a two-term name. For example, the zoological name for the human species is Homo sapiens. This is usually italicized in print or underlined when italics are not available. In this case, Homo is the generic name and it is capitalized; sapiens indicates the species and it is not capitalized ...
Unusual names have caused issues for scientists explaining genetic diseases to lay-people, such as when an individual is affected by a gene with an offensive or insensitive name. [14] This has particularly been noted in patients with a defect in the sonic hedgehog gene pathway and the disease formerly named CATCH22 for "cardiac anomaly, T-cell ...
An example of a long-established taxon that is not also a clade is the class Reptilia, the reptiles; birds and mammals are the descendants of animals traditionally classed as reptiles, but neither is included in the Reptilia (birds are traditionally placed in the class Aves, and mammals in the class Mammalia). [6]